Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Class Matters,’ by Richard D. Kahlenberg

      by

      Richard D. Kahlenberg has long argued for colleges to weigh socioeconomic status to promote diversity. His position is more relevant than ever.CLASS MATTERS: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard D. KahlenbergIf there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.Just before the 1992 election, Kahlenberg notes, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded that the fraction of white voters who felt they had a “personal responsibility” for those injustices was “zero.” Greenberg described affirmative action as a “problem of historic proportions” — as mandatory school desegregation plans had been for an earlier generation of Democrats. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part by soft-pedaling race-specific policy solutions; but as president, Kahlenberg concludes, Clinton felt the need to reward civil rights groups by embracing affirmative action.Unlike many conservatives, Kahlenberg accepts the immense salience of race in American life and thus the unfair disadvantages so many students of color face. But the ugly secret of affirmative action, the author argues, is that most Black beneficiaries are middle-class, while many of the white or Asian applicants left out in the cold are working-class students who have done well in school despite significant disadvantages of their own. Are they less deserving?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Tilt,’ by Emma Pattee

      by

      Emma Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” takes place in the 24 hours after “the really big one” devastates the Pacific Northwest.TILT, by Emma PatteeThe most read New Yorker article of 2015 was Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One,” about the potentially devastating Cascadia earthquake that has a 1-in-3 chance of striking the Pacific Northwest within the next 40 years. Taking this very real threat as its knockout premise, Emma Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” is a moving adrenaline rush that also manages to be very funny.When “the really big one” hits, Annie — who narrates the novel as if addressing her unborn child, “Bean” — is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Ore. “Tilt” takes readers through the next 24 hours, with chapters that flash back to fill in the details of Annie’s life. Annie and her husband, Dom, are “star children who forgot to become stars”: Annie, once a promising playwright, supports them as the office manager at a tech company, while Dom auditions for acting roles and picks up shifts at a cafe. Financially strapped, creatively stifled and increasingly distant, Annie and Dom are, “if not on the path to breaking up, at least able to see the path to breaking up from where we’re standing.”But when Annie emerges from the rubble of Ikea, all she can think of is finding Dom. And so she embarks on a journey across the ravaged city. In the summer heat, swollen and dehydrated, Annie trudges past collapsed bridges and burning houses, looted shops and leveled schools. Along the way, she crosses paths with others in their own dire circumstances — most memorably an Ikea employee named Taylor — some of whose fates we will learn, some of whom the narrative will leave behind as Annie presses on.The ingredients in “Tilt” are familiar: a bit of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” (theater kids in the apocalypse) and a bit of Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” (cutting social observation in the apocalypse); the acerbic takes on marriage and motherhood reminiscent of Ashley Audrain and Rachel Yoder. Shaken together, these ingredients make for a potent cocktail.I cried more than once reading it. The book’s cover image — a small model bird — comes from an anecdote about Annie’s late mother’s unrealized artistic ambitions that is as heartbreaking as any of the tragic scenes Annie encounters on her journey. I also laughed out loud at many of her dark, unfiltered thoughts, like this one: “I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Yoko: The Biography,’ by David Sheff

      by

      David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass.YOKO: The Biography, by David SheffHere’s the thing about Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon (usually not identified in that order), and the subject of David Sheff’s new biography. She is funny — ha-ha, not peculiar.Asked by an interviewer if she’d ever forgive Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, since Pope John Paul II had visited the jail of his own would-be assassin to offer absolution, Ono replied: “I’m not the pope.”Promoting an ephemeral Museum of Modern Art “exhibit” in 1971, in part to protest the underrepresentation of women and Asian people there, she posed in front with a strategically placed shopping bag so that the building signage read “Museum of Modern (F) Art.” (This was years before “Family Guy”!)Elton John recounted in his memoir, “Me,” how he’d wondered why Ono had sold the herd of Holstein cows she’d bought, trying to invest ethically. “All that mooing,” she told him.For Ono, now 92 and mostly out of the public eye, to have written her own “Me” would have been profoundly out of character. Her art was crowdsourced long before that was a word. “Self-Portrait” was a mirror in a manila envelope that reflected the viewer. She invited audiences to step on a painting, play a form of the child’s game Telephone, climb into a bag, cut off her clothing or otherwise “finish” her visions.Following Lennon’s death in 1980, trusted intimates flouted confidentiality agreements, stole the couple’s memorabilia and wrote tell-alls that Ono fought hard to suppress. (“Best book I’ll ever burn,” their son, Sean, told one particularly egregious betrayer in court.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘Twist,’ by Colum McCann

      by

      TWIST, by Colum McCannIt’s a literary conundrum of sorts, how on the surface Colum McCann’s novel “Twist” feels narratively disheveled, with subplots warmed up and abandoned, and loose threads dangling as they do everywhere in life. But the parts are not the sum. McCann, author of six previous novels, including the National Book Award-winning “Let the Great World Spin,” clearly knows what he’s up to — every sentence feels placed with confidence — and through various authorial wiles he has produced a work at once enigmatic and urgent.“Twist” begins with a fairly straightforward narrative. Anthony Fennell, an Irish writer down on his luck, gets an assignment from an online journal to write a piece on the undersea cables that carry the world’s data and the repair teams that patrol the oceans, fixing ruptures. He narrates the saga.Fennell’s editor sends him to Cape Town, where he is to sign on with a repair ship and meet a man named Conway, who is in charge of operations. Waiting in a hotel lobby, Fennell spots Conway on the sidewalk, checking his flip phone. Nothing about the man quite computes. “I certainly thought he would be older, grayer and at the very least have an aura of the smartphone about him,” Fennell thinks. “But here he was, a creature from the unplugged side.” The hook is deftly set.Conway is, and will remain, a mystery: immediate and engaging at first, later aloof and noncommittal — and capable, as we’ll see, of extraordinary actions. Though they’ve just met, he straightaway asks Fennell to come meet his partner, Zanele, a South African-born stage actress. Fennell is wholly taken by her beauty and her obvious bond with Conway. He is now full of conjecture about this man who will preside over his fate for the next weeks.All things change when men are put out to sea. The immensities of sky and ocean are humbling. Shipboard life is a world unto itself, a primal reordering of things, and Fennell is a clear outsider. At the same time, Conway, his only link, has grown distant.Conway charts the path to the first reported break. Though he can be mercurial in his interactions with others, he is completely fixated on his mission. But, as a woman Fennell meets before the trip warns him, “He aspires downward, you’ll see.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Thomas Hoobler, Half of a Prolific Writing Couple, Dies at 82

      by

      He and his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books, most recently one about presidential love letters, “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?”Thomas Hoobler, who with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, wrote 103 books across a vast range of subjects, including young-adult biographies of Margaret Mead, mystery novels set in 18th-century Japan and, most recently, a book about presidential love letters with the attention-grabbing title “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?,” died on Feb. 22 in Manhattan. He was 82.His wife and their daughter, Ellen Hoobler-Banavadikar, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a stroke. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Hooblers were journeyman writers, contributing to series that will be familiar to any pre-teenager or parent of a pre-teenager, including Penguin’s wildly successful history books known by fans as “Big Heads” for their cartoonish covers, which bore titles like “Where Are the Great Pyramids?” (2015) and “What Was the San Francisco Earthquake?” (2016).The couple also wrote their own series. They were proudest of the 10 “American Family Albums” they wrote for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994. The series, which drew on diaries, photographs and newspaper clippings to tell the story of the American immigrant experience, won a slew of honors, according to the Hooblers’ website, including three awards from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, a nonprofit guide to children’s media and toys.The Hooblers wrote 10 “American Family Albums” for Oxford University Press, starting with “The Chinese American Family Album” in 1994.Oxford University PressSuch recognition was typical of the Hooblers’ output for young readers, which drew on extensive research but presented history and personalities in compelling, age-appropriate language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      2 Books With Celebrity Cameos

      by

      A memoir of Greenwich Village; an Argentine story collection.Cardi B, climbing into a car in New York City.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersDear readers,To live in this city is sometimes to be subject to random, unheralded encounters with the great and the good: a sitcom star fumbling for her MetroCard; a famously misanthropic novelist, happy as a clam in the stands at a Yankees game; a disgraced former governor looking entirely too unbothered at the bagel store.A true New Yorker, of course, metabolizes these moments and moves on, cool cucumbers in the face of all but the most outrageous disruptions (a professional sports rival, maybe, or an actual Beatle). Still, I never get tired of the low-wattage zing those run-ins can add to a routine and colorless day, like finding a flamingo on the subway.In literature, as in life, a clever writer can do the same, taking real historical figures of some renown — the kind whose main-character energy usually fills a room — and weaving them neatly into someone else’s story.Though they hail from wildly different genres, identities and points of view, both books here approach their famous-person cameos with satisfying restraint: just a few flamingo feathers, judiciously used.—LeahWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Flannery O’Connor’s Artworks Finally See the Light

      by

      “I don’t know how to write,” Mary Flannery O’Connor once said. “But I can draw.”She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker.Instead, she left for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo residency in New York State, shed “Mary” from her name and published two finely tuned novels about religious belief, the perversely funny “Wise Blood” (1952) and her grave “The Violent Bear it Away” (1960), then a collection of short stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), whose staring contest with belief and tradition in the modernizing South placed her at the front of new regional literature until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.A framed photograph of the interior of the Andalusia farmhouse in Milledgeville, Ga., where O’Connor made paintings that decorated the walls during her lifetime.The Andalusia farmhouse today is a museum devoted to O’Connor’s life. The exhibition of her paintings is at an interpretive center on the premises.Since the republication of those newspaper cartoons, in 2012 — and a deeply researched biography in 2009 — an academic scavenger hunt for the true Flannery O’Connor has taken off. Her prayer journal and unfinished third novel were recently published, a documentary and biopic released. On March 25, for the centenary of her birth, her alma mater, now the Georgia College & State University, will exhibit 70 newly acquired artworks of a different sort, which some O’Connor scholars have heard about but far fewer have seen. Then on March 27, the exhibition moves to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, an exhibition space nearby run by the college.Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks might shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, a Roman Catholic theology that scholars have debated for 70 years and infamously protective gatekeepers — her mother and cousin — who may have resisted access to O’Connor’s artwork.On a balmy afternoon during Lent, Seth Walker, the college’s vice president of advancement, led me up two flights of stairs of a peeling Federal-style foursquare house in downtown Milledgeville, where O’Connor, age 13 and a self-described “pigeon-toed” only child “with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex,” moved from Savannah with her parents, and where she would reside until age 20.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

      by

      A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More