On the Front Table this week, explorations of mankind's relationship to myth, critiques of virtual transparency, ideas of heaven and hell, (still) urgent analyses of American life, the history of the codpiece, and more! Browse anytime at semcoop.com
“Barack Obama first joined the Co-op in 1986,” writes Craig Fehrman in Author In Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote, “and for many years he would duck into 57th Street’s basement location, wearing a leather jacket in the winter and shirtsleeves rolled up in the summer, browsing quietly while the shop echoed with the sounds of the apartment dwellers above. Obama often came at night, just before closing, circling the new releases table in the front, studying the staff selections along the back, and usually leaving with a small stack of novels and nonfiction. At the counter, he would spell his name to get the member discount—a treasured and anonymous ritual unless your name was strange enough, and your visits frequent enough, that a clerk might start to remember you.”
Listen to Craig Fehrman on Open Stacks as he discusses the books Obama and other Illinois hopefuls read and wrote, and the bookstores they browsed.
As this beguiling literary companion demonstrates, bird watching offers an encounter with the ineffable, with the transcendence of song and flight, with fragile and evanescent beauty. American Birds gathers evocative and surprising writings on birds and our fascination with them from an astonishing array of American poets and writers. Experience the exquisite beauty of Native American songs about birds. Accompany Emerson and Thoreau birding together around Walden Pond. Delight in Sarah Orne Jewett’s poignant tale of a snowy egret in the Maine woods. Join Rachel Carson as she watches skimmers along the Atlantic coast. And thrill to an impressive roster of modern and contemporary poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Sterling A. Brown, Louise Erdrich, and David Tomas Martinez, as they evoke the magic and haunting beauty of America’s birds. Celebrating our ardent engagement with the wondrous creatures around and above us, this dazzling collection is a one-of-a-kind field guide to the American literary imagination.
Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection—with men and women, colleagues and strangers. Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things—how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.
Based on a decade of research and reporting, Author in Chief tells the story of America's presidents as authors—and offers a delightful new window into the public and private lives of our highest leaders. From volumes lost to history—Calvin Coolidge's Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929—to ones we know and love—Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never published—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, the first presidential book to influence a campaign, and John Adams's Autobiography, the first score-settling presidential memoir, Author in Chief draws on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to cast fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation's leaders.
The eighth part of Roberto Calasso’s singular work in progress that began in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch, The Celestial Hunter is an inspired and provocative exploration of mankind’s relationship with myth, the divine, and the idea of transformation. There was a time, even before prehistory, when man was simply a defenseless animal. Soon, however, man learned to imitate the animals that attacked him and he became a hunter. Suddenly, Calasso posits, the notion of the hunter became fundamental. It would be developed over thousands of years through the figures that became central to Greek mythology. Vivid and strikingly original, and expertly translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, The Celestial Hunter traces how man created the divine myths that would become the cornerstones of Western civilization. As Calasso demonstrates, the repercussions of these ideas would echo through history, from Paleolithic to modern times. And they would be the product of one thing: the human mind.
Retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Bernard Harcourt's Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care. We are building what Harcourt calls the expository society—a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist.
Furious Feminisms (University of Minnesota Press)
By Carlo Ginzburg & Bruce Lincoln
While both fans and foes point to Mad Max: Fury Road’s feminist credentials, Furious Feminisms asks: is there really anything feminist or radical happening on the screen? The four authors—from backgrounds in art history, American literature, disability studies, and sociology—ask what is possible, desirable, or damaging in theorizing feminism in the contested landscape of the twenty-first century. Can we find beauty in the Anthropocene? Can power be wrested from a violent system without employing and perpetuating violence? This experiment in collaborative criticism weaves multiple threads of dialogue together to offer a fresh perspective on our current cultural moment.
A New York Times bestselling historian of early Christianity takes on two of the most gripping questions of human existence: where did the ideas of heaven and hell come from, and why do they endure? In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death. In Heaven and Hell, he does the next best thing: by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear.
“American political life has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,” Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) writes at the beginning of The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter offered groundbreaking and still urgent analyses of deep undercurrents in American life: a stubborn, irrepressible opposition to rationality, expertise, and higher learning, and the destabilizing pull exercised by conspiratorial movements on the right and left. Here for the first time in a single authoritative annotated edition are two masterworks by one of America’s greatest historians:The Paranoid Style (1965) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). Included in this volume are his most trenchant uncollected writings from the period: discussions of the Constitution’s framers, the personality and legacy of FDR, higher education and its discontents, the rise and fall of the antitrust movement, and the genius of Alexis de Tocqueville, among other subjects.
The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. We haven’t known how much the country will gain by properly valuing homes and businesses, family structures, voters, and school districts in Black neighborhoods. And we need to know. Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued and provides a new means of determining the value of Black communities. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives of the past and present, it gives fresh insights on the historical effects of racism and provides a new value paradigm to limit them in the future. Know Your Price demonstrates the worth of Black people’s intrinsic personal strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. These assets are a means of empowerment and, as Perry argues in this provocative and very personal book, are what we need to know and understand to build Black prosperity.
“[William] James’s entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life,” John Kaag writes—and that’s why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James’s life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology—and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous—can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living. In fact, all of James’s pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James. Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you’ll ever read.
A laugh-out-loud visual history of the strangest piece of men’s clothing ever created: the codpiece. The codpiece was fashioned in the Middle Ages to close a revealing gap between two separate pieces of men’s tights. By the sixteenth century, it had become an upscale must-have accessory. Glover’s witty and entertaining prose reveals how male vanity turned a piece of cloth into a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself. Centuries of male self-importance and delusion are on display in this highly enjoyably new title. Glover’s book moves from paintings to contemporary culture and back again as it charts the growing popularity of the codpiece and its eventual decline. The first history of its kind, this book is a must-read for art historians, anthropologists, fashion aficionados, and readers looking for a good, long laugh.
What does democracy look like? And when should we cause trouble to pursue it? Troublemakers fuses photography and history to demonstrate how racial and economic inequality gave rise to a decades-long struggle for justice in one American city. In dialogue with 275 of Art Shay’s photographs, Erik S. Gellman takes a new look at major developments in postwar US history. Shay himself was a “troublemaker,” seeking to unsettle society by illuminating truths that many middle-class, white, media, political, and businesspeople pretended did not exist. Shay served as a navigator in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, then took a position as a writer for Life Magazine. But soon after his 1948 move to Chicago, he decided to become a freelance photographer. His lens captured everything from private moments of rebellion to era-defining public movements, as he sought to understand the creative and destructive energies that propelled freedom struggles in the Windy City. Shay illuminated the pain and ecstasy that sprung up from the streets of Chicago, while Gellman reveals their collective impact on the urban fabric and on our national narrative.
Take your time. Browse each week's Front Table at semcoop.com
