Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 7
In 1976 John Leonard reviewed Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts for The New York Times:
Those rumbles you hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn lining up, the howitzers of Vonnegut and Updike and Cheever and Mailer, the books that will be making loud noises for the next several months. But listen: this week a remarkable book has been quietly published; it is one of the best I’ve read in years.
Kingston was about as far from literary stardom as a published writer could be. She was from the West Coast, she was first-generation Chinese American, she taught English and creative writing at a small college in Hawaii, she was a woman. “Who is Maxine Hong Kingston?” Leonard asks. “Nobody at Knopf seems to know. They have never laid eyes on her.” Yet The Woman Warrior hit the literary world with such convincing force that the author went from the obscurest of the obscure to the winner of the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, her book acing out the favorite, Irving Howe’s extensive, learned, and haunting narrative about Yiddishkeit and its fate in America, World of Our Fathers.
CONTENT
Cathleen Schine
‘Binding and Building’ America. Maxine Hong Kingston’s best work has a timeless quality, fresh, beautiful, horrifying, bursting with myth and fantasy and nagging reality.
Jameel Jaffer*
Judging in Secret. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was once known as the “constitutional conscience” of the executive branch, but in recent years it has been known principally for green-lighting torture, mass surveillance, and extrajudicial killings.
Rumaan Alam
A Formative Loss. In her novel The Furrows, Namwali Serpell’s pyrotechnics convey the madness, repetition, disruption, and shock of grief.
Matt Seaton
The British Broadcasting Conundrum. World War II was the BBC’s finest hour, but its history since then reflects the corporation’s gradual loss of primacy in British life.
Geoffrey O’Brien
Joe Brainard’s Communal Intimacy. While Brainard’s recurring subject was himself, he somehow kept himself at a distance, an object in a world of other bodies.
Robert Kuttner
300 Years of ‘Too Big to Jail’. In Impunity and Capitalism, Trevor Jackson shows how, between about 1690 and 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and were treated as everyone’s fault and no one’s.
Daniel Mendelsohn, Homer
Odysseus Saved from the Sea. a poem
Ruth Margalit
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew. Arabesques is Anton Shammas’s lament for the catastrophe of 1948 and his paean to Hebrew and Arabic, languages he has spent a lifetime navigating between.
Michelle Nijhuis
Refill the Swamp!
Two recent books show that the concept of ecological restoration is a fuzzy one: even practitioners rarely agree on what is being restored, or to what end.
E. Tammy Kim
The Safe Harbor. The longshoreman labor leader Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.
John Banville
Special Correspondent. As a public man, John le Carré was a model of probity and rectitude; in his private life, he was not above double-dealing.
Miranda Seymour
Consider the Publisher. Behind Mary Wollstonecraft was a courageous publisher and his network of eighteenth-century London’s most radical minds.
Mark O’Connell
Hastening the End. Adam Kirsch’s Revolt Against Humanity is a survey of transhumanist thought, a diverse field united by cosmic pessimism.
Isabel Galleymore
Interior Design. a poem
William Dalrymple
Garum Masala. Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.
Manisha Sinha
The Beautiful Struggle. Several scholars have been recovering the lives and ideas of antebellum Black activists by studying their involvement in early Black newspapers and conventions.
Negar Azimi
Wilder, Riskier, More Generous. A new collection demonstrates that Cookie Mueller was not just another avant-garde It Girl of the downtown scene, but a writer of rare voice and imagination.
Matthew Desmond
The High Cost of Being Poor. The American government gives the most help to those who need it least. This is the true nature of our welfare state.
Perry Link, Adam S. Wilkins, Martha C. Nussbaum
How Cruel Is Nature?: An Exchange
Letters
David H. DeVorkinWritten in the Stars
Virginia Casper, Doug Hertzler, Caroline Levine, Sheldon Pollock, et al.
A Call to Divest