RECOMMENDED

One of the many awful aftershocks of a violent incident like the Boston Marathon bombings is the tendency of public figures to say terrible things while trying to make sense of what happened and why. Among the unproductive statements made recently, unfortunately by quite a few well-meaning people, is an idea that “there’s no explanation for what happened.” Sure, I will grant that there’s no justification. But “there’s no explanation” indicates that we just don’t want to understand. This is an understandable, but regrettable, impulse. It is  an impulse closely related to the constitutive element of hatred: the refusal to understand. When we refuse to understand, we turn the object of our misunderstanding into a potential object of hatred. We must recognize that there are explanations. They may be illegitimate, awful and evil but there are explanations.

In “American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men,” David McConnell presents a thoughtful and well researched, if uneven, alternative to the silence impulse. He writes about violence perpetrated by men against men who are either gay or perceived to be gay—mostly what could be referred to as “hate crimes” (a label McConnell discards: “admitting ‘hate crimes’ looks like criminalizing motive, and that looks like criminalizing thought”). Instead, “I settled on the exotic-sounding words ‘honor killings’ in the book title, because, incredibly, that’s what these crimes resemble.” It’s a good observation. The murders he describes are all revenge killings for perceived violations of normative, heterosexual masculinity. Like other murders we call honor killings, the motivations for these murders clearly fall on the dark end of a spectrum of human values. They are twisted understandings of honor and pride, but their relation to what we, the normal, would call honor and pride, are what make them both repulsive and fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Acclaimed science writer Mary Roach fell in love with human anatomy in her fifth-grade science class when Mrs. Claflin introduced her to a “headless, limbless modeled plastic-torso,” and got her hands on model organs that “fit together like puzzle pieces, tidy as wares in a butcher’s glass case.” This introduction, along with the findings from a 1968 study on humans’ intolerance to bacteria-ridden food and an evident personal curiosity for the scientific taboo help lead to “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Roach’s latest book.

Roach’s witty and conversational voice allows “Gulp” to read like a novel rather than a science book. Instead of being taught about our digestive system we are told about it. And, for anyone who’s ever flunked an exam on the periodic table or failed to locate the pancreas of a dissected frog, there’s a huge difference. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Canadian-born writer/film critic/pop-cultural savant Michelle Orange launches “This Is Running for Your Life” with a meditation on youth and taste and nostalgia (also, Ethan Hawke’s face). She then moves on to a close reading of the Hollywood dream girl, Marilyn Monroe through manic pixie, an essay on her grandmother’s life and death, collected observations on the city of Beirut. She writes about photography, about brain-imaging, about San Diego and Hawai’i and Halifax. The result is a collection that’s original and engaging and weird and very, very smart.

Each essay is a kind of narrative patchwork, with disparate pieces assembled and artfully laid out for consideration. “War and Well-Being, 21° 19’N., 157° 52’W,” for example—arguably the centerpiece of the collection—considers the experience of being in Hawai’i, the state of modern psychiatry, shopping, World War II and the DSM-IV. The product falls somewhere between long-form journalism and collage: sprawling and brilliant and offering the illusion that only the best craftsmanship can—that you’ve crawled inside Orange’s mind, which happens to be gorgeous and funny and a marked improvement on your own. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

J. R. R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit” was released seventy-five years ago this past month, introducing readers to Bilbo Baggins and his adventures with Gandalf and a group of dwarves. It was the first introduction most people had to Middle Earth, which Tolkien revealed in the book’s sequel “Lord of the Rings,” and the vast amounts of stories and histories released after his death.

For its anniversary, and in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation of the book by Peter Jackson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who has the US publishing rights to the book, has put out a guide by Corey Olsen, “Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit.’” It’s intended as an analysis and description of “The Hobbit,” going slowly through the book, chapter by chapter, and taking a close look at Tolkien ‘s writing process.

Olsen is a professor of English at Washington College and produces a podcast called “The Tolkien Professor,” and some of that podcast is reproduced in the book. The conflict between the two Bilbos—the adventurous Took and the homely Baggins, how Tolkien uses humor to lighten some of the violence and Olsen’s dissection of “dragon-sickness”—are all adapted from the podcast. Read the rest of this entry »

In February 2010, David Shields released “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” In this text, Shields laid out a barrage of thoughts (some his own, but most grabbed and remixed from the voices and works of other thinkers and writers), arranging them into twenty-six theme-driven chapters. All this in an effort to light a fire in the world of fiction, which “Reality Hunger” chastised as an increasingly hermetic one, amidst an era of hyper media-saturation, constantly evolving form, and an overwhelming public demand for sensation and brevity.

“Fakes,” a new anthology of writing curated by Shields and Matthew Vollmer, represents a work in this vein. With its plurality of voices, all pushing at the edges of form in various—but always short-lived—styles, this collection (subtitled “An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts and Other Fraudulent Artifacts”) highlights and propagates an alternative to the marginalized voice of The Author.

There’s no arguing that the amount of pure information which inundates us daily is, to say the least, staggering—especially if you’ve got a desk job. Novel reading has dropped off noticeably in this climate, but the energy of The Novel’s soul (“or whatever it is inside us that  might otherwise wither, if not for the life-giving and life-sustaining energy of art,” the foreword states) remains abundant, and wonders where to go, this shared human energy of story and language. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Take up the white man’s burden \ Send forth the best ye breed \ Go bind your sons to exile \ To serve your captives’ need”

When Rudyard Kipling wrote those words in 1899, European imperialism in Africa and Asia had reached its apex. It had been growing since a century before, when Napoleon invaded Egypt in an attempt to gain an advantage over Britain in the Middle East. Philosophers, journalists, writers and other men of words saw the dangers of European imperialism, and worked to push them back using their pens. Pankaj Mishra’s new book “From the Ruins of Empire” is about how these thinkers pushed back Western power and how they developed concepts of Eastern identity.

The book has already been compared to Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” which criticized similar men from Europe, who studied the East for the benefit of their home empires. Both books start their history of imperialism with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, but from there, the similarities are few. Mishra doesn’t focus the book on writers who fundamentally misunderstood Western civilization, nor does he find ulterior motives in their work. He instead looks at philosophers who understood Western values and explicitly worked to release Asians from European’s hold by creating their own identity. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Do you know Davy Rothbart? You probably feel like you do if you’ve ever picked up an issue of Found magazine at Quimby’s, or tunneled through an afternoon on the Found website. Maybe your ears perk when he’s on “This American Life. ” Or maybe you’ve actually met him? Davy is a guy who says hi to everyone, who could have a conversation with a brick wall and make it interesting, a guy who promotes his myriad projects by touring the country for months at a time, and Davy might be the only person in the world who’s hung out with both Mister Rogers and Kid Rock.

I met Davy through a friend of a friend back in the very first days of Found, which launched in Chicago in 2001. Within months, he had hooked me up with the weirdest job I’ve ever had selling tickets to various events out of an art gallery. Davy also set me up with a place to crash on my first college road trip, UIC to New Mexico, in an adobe house in the mountains of Taos. I had never met Liam, my host, until I arrived.

This is all to say that Davy makes fast friends, and his new memoir, “My Heart Is an Idiot” provides a glimpse into the roving, generous spirit that compels him to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

In an existence full of lattes, bus fare, text messages, work meetings and rent, it’s possible to forget we are members of the animal kingdom. We are apes. And our bodies, hairless as they are, are strange, wondrous, disgusting and unpredictable. “Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That?” is research psychologist Jesse Bering’s latest book, an examination of what, biologically, makes us human. Bering is a regular contributor to Scientific American and Slate and anyone familiar with his columns knows the goofy, self-deprecatory way he has of digesting lofty concepts. This book, like its dubious title, is a prime specimen.

“Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That?” employs a “reverse engineering” mode, sounding the mysteries of human anatomy with what science now knows to educatedly guess what we don’t—the basis of evolutionary psychology. The intersection of modern life with ancient evolutionary prerogatives is, naturally, hilarious. Evolutionary psychology is a hotly contested field, and Bering knows it, asking that readers weigh the studies with discretion and their own further research, pairing joyful curiosity with scientific rigor. He offers full disclosure in the “Invitation to Impropriety,” revealing himself “a godless, gay, psychological scientist with a penchant for far-flung evolutionary theories.” And the irreverence only creeps in steadily from there. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the 1960s, writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson started what became known as the Gonzo style of journalism, in which writers used a combination of writing techniques and self-immersion in their subjects to create a bold new form of writing. Isabelle Eberhardt did it too, only more than five decades earlier. Long before T. E. Lawrence dressed in Turkish drag to run intelligence during the Great War, the Swiss-born Eberhardt went undercover into Islamic society in North Africa to study the language and culture. She eventually became a Sufi practitioner, and become not only one of the first Europeans to write about twentieth-century Muslim life, but also a proto feminist-anarchist writer. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Michael Moorcock is a difficult fellow to pigeonhole. He’s won practically every award given to writers in the genres of fantasy and science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you prefer), including the Nebula and Bram Stoker Award. As the editor of New Worlds, he helped shape the course of science fiction writing in the mid-twentieth century. Then there’s his career as a musician and as a historian of London. Recently, he wrote a “Doctor Who” novel. Who else could claim friendships with figures as divergent as Woody Guthrie, William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke and Alan Moore? Who else would begin life in the East End of London during the Blitz, and end up spending his golden years in the hill country outside Austin, Texas? Read the rest of this entry »