“To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent.” The French philosopher Emanuele Coccia begins his book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture with these words, following a similar thread of symbiotic speculation throughout the pages….
Category: Book Review
The aptly titled Convenience Store Woman is Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata’s tenth novel, and the first to be translated into English. The story focuses on Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six year old single woman who works at a ‘Smile Mart’ Tokyo convenience store. Furukura is not only content, but happy with her life as a convenience…
The word “Commonwealth” has a particular place in Massachusetts vernacular. It’s common to find the word used as political branding, “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts” as an obvious example. But beyond sounding nostalgic, orderly, and constitutional, “Commonwealth” literally means, well-being—wealth, shared by all—common: Commonwealth. This reminder begins Jedidiah Purdy’s newest book, This Land is Our Land:…
Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next month, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of the…
What do Cold War Bunkers in South Dakota, real estate transactions in New Zealand, Elon Musk at a conference in LA, the Chernobyl wasteland, and a wilderness retreat in Scotland all have in common? For Mark O’Connell in Notes From an Apocalypse, all these places are at the center of how humans are handling anxieties…
Progress is a funny little word. As we have trudged forth with our comprehension of “other” United States history – that is a sort of bottom-up, from the margins view of those that have been discriminated and oppressed, we have uncovered uncomfortable truths and perspectives. These views have widened our focus on the American story…
In timely fashion, authors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith investigate baseball, war culture, and the pandemic of 1918 in Boston during the late stages of World War I. This book uses three characters as the driving force of time in their work: an ascendant Babe Ruth, at the time on the Boston Red Sox, Karl…
“But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her…
What was it Stalin once said? A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic? Dates too, in the sea of history, can shed their essence and become empty numbers in the expanse of time. I thought a lot about this as I read Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, an…
One of the attributes I always revere when reading novels is an author’s ability to create characters that demonstrate both the ideals and fears of an age and the dreams and realities of individuals. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, we meet Lizzie, a mother and wife who is balancing a multitude of personal issues that are…