AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

• The Nomad in Situ, or, the Man of the Crowd in the Time of COVID
• Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio)

The emergence of the global pandemic and ongoing COVID-19 crisis has fostered a profound and personal awareness of space and place, such that one's apprehension of one's place in space is perhaps all the more real than it may have seemed a year or two earlier. That is, everyday life under the effects of COVID-19 has become marked with a sense of place, as thousands or millions of individual subjects found themselves facing stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, closures, travel restrictions, and the now ubiquitous concept of social distancing, a phrase that quite literally draws our attention to one's "place" relative to that of others, right down to maintaining a space of six feet between ourselves and our fellow humans. What Heidegger called "the They" seems all the more ominous in this respect, and the Angst he identified with the Unheimlich or "uncanny" and with "not being at home" ("nichts-zu-Hause-sein") takes on new resonances as well, when people are being anxiously reminded to stay at home, a rather uncanny state to be in, or else being warned to keep our distance when in the public spaces of the agora. Our most homely settings are all the more unheimlich today, and the familiar space of one's apartment or house seems now truly uncanny for so many people.

In my Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination and elsewhere, I have suggested that the experience of being lost is probably the condition under which we are most viscerally aware of space and place. The Angst-ridden disorientation, fear, and dread that comes with not knowing where we are and how to get to where we want to be: this makes us all too conscious of our place, or perhaps our displacement, in space. But for many living in the COVID era the experience of spatial limitation, of being forced to stay in one's place or to restrict one's movements to a specified number or type of relatively familiar, known places, carries with it a powerful sense [End Page 79] of our spatiality and our situatedness in space, with similar levels of anxiety. The places where we find ourselves located are not at all unfamiliar, especially when we are literally staying "at home," but the situation is changed. Home is no longer quite so homely, and this is a profoundly "unsettling" experience.

Here I should add, parenthetically but significantly, due recognition of all those people for whom working from home is and was not an option. I am hopeful, though not very confident, that one result of the pervasive COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath will be for more and more peopl

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• Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff
• Jessi Rae Morton (bio)

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, began as an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and its first run was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who were unable to view the exhibition in 2020 or during its second presentation (from August 2021 to January 2022), Alexander and Sackeroff's book provides a potential alternative by incorporating and cataloging large portions of the exhibit. The book consists of four essays, one each by the authors as well as contributions from Julia Voss and Mark Wasiuta, alongside numerous photos, reproductions of artworks, and smaller sections dealing with specific elements of the topic in more detail.

When Afterlives first arrived in my mailbox, its physical presence was immediate and undeniable. With its stunning cover and its many pages of images, the book appears more like a coffee-table book than an academic text. The physical presence of the book is part of its main point, after all. Alexander and Sackeroff offer an opportunity to engage with objects and artworks that have been looted, lost, and damaged, and their book powerfully presences these objects. According to Alexander's essay, Walter Benjamin "understood that history … is capable of inflicting blows not only on the people who get erased from its record but on things that either survive or don't." Afterlives "is populated by the testimonies of those objects and the people who helped them survive to be seen today."

Afterlives prioritizes the idea that "all works of art tell stories, but sometimes they are also actors in a larger and broader narrative." In this case, the [End Page 144] broader narratives are World War II, Nazi looting, and the Holocaust. Following the book's introduction, in an essay that focuses on visual art, Alexander points out that some works reproduced in the text "were destroyed or remain lost, surviving only in reproductions." She provides a thorough overview of the process of Nazi looting, including how books and artworks were sought, documented, and transported. She also explains the recovery and preservation efforts with special attention to actions by women which have sometimes been overshadowed by the better-known Monuments Men in other works on the subject.

In his essay "Reconstructing Culture," Sackeroff prioritizes books a

• The Heartbreak of Desire
• E. Ethelbert Miller (bio)

In 2001, Red Dragonfly Press published my book Buddha Weeping in Winter. This collection was an outgrowth of my interest in Buddhism. I am not a Buddhist, but perhaps I am a Buddhist at heart. What motivates and guides me is not a doctrine or sacred text but a way of looking at the world, a way of acknowledging life in living things, a way of knowing that everything begins with a way of questioning. Poets are not philosophers, but their troubling minds often struggle to translate beauty into words. Where does such beauty come from? How does one know that what one sees is real? And after turning away from beauty, how does one embrace the waves of ugliness in the world? How does one look beyond the horizon and the shore? How does a poet write of love after suffering the heartbreak of desire and the disappointment in social movements that fail?

I was beginning the decade of my fifties back in 2001. For thirty years I had been reading books about Sufism, Eastern religions, and Zen Buddhism. In 1970, Reginald Hudgins, my college roommate at Howard University, returned from Philadelphia at the start of the second semester with a small flute and a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Where he had once burned incense to cover the smell of reefer, he now burn sandalwood, frankincense, and myrrh and took on a more contemplative demeanor. It might have been called meditation if he had closed his eyes. A shared space in a college dorm can affect your life more than a lecture or science lab. Reggie's interest in Eastern philosophy renewed my interest in religion. I never told my mother I wanted to follow in my older brother Richard's footsteps. Didn't he become a Trappist monk? Did he not leave behind his Thomas Merton books in the hallway closet? Oh, I was always opening the doors to closets and looking to see what was hidden in the dark. Oh, the wonder of it all when I closed my eyes and said my prayers. Who or what was I praying to, and did I dare?

Around 1970, I was searching for something while deciding to become a [End Page 50] writer. I was wrestling with trying to determine the difference between loneliness and solitude. How often did I find myself in a crowded space sitting by myself? My first poems were love poems and primarily poems of desire, word sketches from across the room. I was not a social person. I avoided parties and dancing. I was bookish and wore glasses. I was skinny, or what a kind person might consider lanky. I spent time thinking about the meaning of life and the existence of God. I had read in Time magazine that God was dead. So I feared the possibility of another funeral in Brooklyn and a long trip from the Bronx to a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews and West Indians. Even when t

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• When the World Walks toward You by Myra Shapiro
• Bonny Finberg (bio)

Throw a word into the room And see where it goes.

These words reflect Myra Shapiro's love affair with language and, more broadly, with the world.

Her latest book of poems isn't a "collected poems" but rather a documentation of an arrival, a travelogue, guiding us through the stops and starts, the destinations reached, on a long, eventful life. It's her personal road map: ancestral precedents, a multitude of pivotal points, transformative events, and emotional milestones that culminate from forks in the road, those taken and not taken, decisions delayed, the triumphant realization of dreams along the way, abundant rewards and inevitable losses—in other words, life.

Shapiro's life is woven of many lives, one thread leading to and joining another until a unified tapestry is apparent. She gifts us with sharp-eyed insights into her developing self, from youth to old age, from daughter to lover to wife to mother—to widow—where she finds herself at this moment in time. She is more than any one of these things, and so much more than the sum of their parts.

In this slim yet epic-like collection, Shapiro gives us a clear-eyed, nearly telescopic look into her life through which our own lives—past, present, future—might be viewed. Often, the telescope, meant to bring what is in the distance, the inevitable future, closer, is replaced with her microscopic eye, bringing us closer to what is essential, firmly situated in the moment.

Her trajectory from a warm Jewish childhood, through a southern suburb, the love of a husband and children, balancing all this while becoming a librarian, a teacher, a graduate student, to fully realized poet living in New York City, are revealed in exquisitely condensed language: [End Page 101]

In the avocado green of a kitchen,a 50s marriage, children, I wanted wings, I wanted Paris

Grief, whose shadow she was born into, runs through this collection. Born after a sister died at eleven years of age, Shapiro must have felt grief's phantom early in life. Decades later, visiting her sister's tiny, overgrown grave, left untouched for eighty years, she brings us close to the haunting presence, the living absence, death's survival within the living.

These poems reveal how, in memory, life defeats death. Shapiro reminds us that memory is served up by t

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• Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows by Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman
• Katerina Hatzikidi (bio)

Countries at war, the death of a prosecutor on the eve of his testimony before Congress, and the massacre of thousands of citizens targeted as "internal enemies" are some of the events, quite distant in time and space, that come under scrutiny in Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman's book. What they all have in common are conspiracy theories that attempt to either a posteriori make sense of often large-scale events (such as the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, allegedly motivated by the competition between two foreign oil companies who wanted control of the Chaco region) or a priori convince of the imminent threat a given "enemy" is posing to society at large (as was largely believed to be the case for citizens of Haitian descent in 1937 Dominican Republic). Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows meticulously explores conspiracism in Latin America, offering a rich and wide-ranging discussion of an ever-present phenomenon.

No conspiracy theory is deemed wild enough to be unworthy of careful examination. Indeed, the authors caution against sharp distinctions, noting that the boundaries between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories "are often ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations." In their understanding, conspiracy theories usually have a "factual basis" but "selectively highlight some facts and discredit others" in order to force associations and create narratives about "a conspiratorial master plan." And in a region like Latin America, with a long history of real plots and conspiracies changing the course of events, it is unsurprising that suspicion and conspiracism often find fertile ground.

For Roniger and Senkman, conspiracy theories reveal both an underlying logic that searches for order when sociohistorical conjunctures are experienced [End Page 37] as particularly confusing and chaotic, and a theory of power with tremendous mobilizing potential. Their non-pathologizing approach to conspiracy theories borrows from ethnography when it insists on contextualizing conspiratorial narratives and analyzing the "specific circumstances of their emergence, resonance, and implications." A stated aim of the book is to understand what factors contribute to making certain conspiracy theories attractive at given

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• That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy by Lou Perez
• Robert Kramer (bio)

Warning: There may be passages in this book (and in this review) that some readers will find offensive. However, I do not consider this problematic. I think it is healthy to confront opinions and attitudes different from ours, because it may encourage us to examine our own views more closely and perhaps even rethink them and modify them if necessary.

But what kind of book is this? The subtitle proclaims its subject is "the Death and Rebirth of Comedy." Yet this volume is much more than that.

Among other things, it is a sort of autobiography of a minority artist, a discussion of the goals and possibilities of comedy in general, a statement of some of the author's theories on the subject, a primer on becoming a comedian, an indictment of some of the excesses of political correctness and wokism, and a compendium of wisecracks and funny stories. It shines an alternative light on the many moods of America today.

At its core, That Joke is essentially serious. It deals with some major problems, issues, and tensions in American society, with varying degrees of depth and gravity. For Perez, one of the underlying causes of tension in the US today is the tendency to think in terms of group membership, whether ethnic, racial, religious, or economic, while ignoring or underestimating individual differences within each group. Such an attitude leads to demands for quotas, which can be divisive and self-defeating. [End Page 140]

Perez does not focus on the major long-term problems of racial discrimination in the United States, although, of course, he does not deny them. Rather, he calls attention to the dangers in the implementation and dissemination of certain woke theories. For example, he cites the opinions of woke leader Ibram X. Kendi, the author of multiple New York Times best-sellers and winner of a MacArthur "Genius Grant."

Kendi claims that the concept of intelligence is purely subjective and seems to agree with my congressman, Jamaal Bowman, that "standardized testing is the pillar of systemic racism," as if it would be better not to know the facts, better not to know what needs to be fixed. Kendi's parents had told him that education and hard work would uplift him, "just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all black people." Kendi calls such attitudes assimilationist or products of belief in white supremacy.