Category Archives: Book Reviews

Arts & Literature, Book Reviews, Essays, Literature, Reviews

Moby-Dick, Perpetual Inquiry, and the Sublime

“Call me Ishmael.”

This iconic first line anchors one of the most enduring openings in American literature. Yet before it is spoken, before Ishmael’s voice emerges on the page, we encounter something more unusual: a kind of literary invocation. The opening pages of Moby-Dick—those dense, eclectic “Extracts” quoting scripture, classical literature, scientific treatises, and forgotten travelogues—do not serve as a traditional preface. Instead, they operate like a ritual threshold. They ask us to enter the novel not as a narrative, but as a vast textual cosmos.

Melville’s fictional “sub-sub-librarian” gathers fragments from Job to Shakespeare to obscure whaling reports, assembling a chorus of voices that have, across centuries, spoken of the whale. This pre-narrative collage is more than ornamentation. It proposes a foundational idea: that the whale lives not only in the ocean, but in language. Not only in myth, but in memory. Not only in flesh, but in thought.

Before the Pequod ever sets sail, Melville has already charted his central course—into the ocean of human imagination, where the whale swims through texts, dreams, and questions that refuse easy resolution.

Proof of Two Lives

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section,” remarks literary critic Wyatt Mason on The World in Time, a podcast hosted by Lewis Lapham. “It’s proof of two kinds of life. The life of the creature itself, and the life of the mind—the attention we pay over time to this creature.”

Mason’s comment offers a keel for the voyage ahead. In Moby-Dick, the whale is not simply an animal or antagonist. It becomes a metaphysical magnet, a mirror for human understanding, a challenge to the limits of knowing. The “Extracts” and “Etymologies,” often dismissed as digressions, are in fact sacred rites—texts that beg to be read with reverence.

In teaching the novel to incarcerated students through the Bard Prison Initiative, Mason and fellow writer Donovan Hohn describe how these obscure, labyrinthine sections are received not as trivia but as scripture. The students descend into the archive as divers into a shipwreck—recovering fragments of forgotten wisdom, learning to breathe in the pressure of incomprehensibility. “The whale,” Mason repeats, “resides or lives in texts.” And what a library it is.

The Whale as Philosophy

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

Harold Bloom, the late sage of literary criticism, would have nodded at Mason’s insight. For Bloom, Moby-Dick was not merely a novel, but “a giant Shakespearean prose poem.” Melville, he believed, was a tragedian of the American soul. Captain Ahab, mad with self-reliance, became for Bloom a Promethean figure—bound not by divine punishment, but by his own obsessive will.

In Bloom’s classroom at Yale in 2011, there were no lecture notes. He taught Moby-Dick like a jazz solo—improvised, living, drawn from a lifetime of memory and myth. “It’s very unfair,” he said, reflecting on the whale hunts—great mammals hunted with harpoons and lances. Yet the Pequod’s most moral man, Starbuck, is also its most proficient killer. A Quaker devoted to peace, he is also the ship’s deadliest lance. This contradiction—gentleness and violence braided together—is the essence of Melville’s philosophy.

The whale, in Bloom’s reading, is sublime not because it symbolizes any one thing—God, evil, justice, nature—but because it cannot be pinned down. It is an open question. An unending inquiry. A canvas for paradox. “Heaven help them all,” Bloom said of the Pequod’s doomed crew. “And us.”

Melville the Environmentalist

“There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Where Bloom heard Melville’s music in metaphor and myth, Richard J. King hears it in science. In Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019), King charts a different map—overlaying Melville’s imagined ocean onto real tides, real whales, real voyages. He sails replica whalers, interviews marine biologists, pores over Melville’s notebooks.

His inquiry begins with a straightforward question: could a sperm whale really destroy a ship? Historical records suggest yes. But King doesn’t stop at anatomy. His portrait of Melville reveals a proto-environmentalist, someone who revered the sea not just as symbol but as system. Melville’s whale, King argues, is a creature of wonder and terror, not just prey but presence.

In an age of ecological crisis, King reframes Moby-Dick as a book not just of metaphor but of environmental ethics. Ishmael’s meandering digressions become meditations on the ocean as moral agent—an entity capable of sustaining and destroying. The sea is no backdrop; it is a character, a god, an intelligence. Melville’s ocean, King suggests, humbles the hubris of Ahab and calls readers to ecological humility.

Rediscovery in Dark Times

“Strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

Aaron Sachs, in Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times (2022), picks up the whale’s trail in the 20th century. In 1929, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, the writer and historian Lewis Mumford resurrected Melville from literary oblivion. His biography of the long-forgotten author recast Melville not as a failure, but as a visionary.

For Mumford, Melville was a kindred spirit—a man who, long before the term “modernity” took hold, had already seen its psychic cost. As Mumford watched the rise of industry, mass production, and spiritual exhaustion, he found in Melville a dark prophet. Ahab’s fury was not personal—it was civilizational.

Critics have praised Sachs’s biography as timely and thoughtful. Its thesis is clear: in times of disorientation, literature does more than reflect the world—it refracts it. It preserves vital truths, repurposing them when our present crises demand older insights.

In Sachs’s telling, Moby-Dick is not just a classic; it’s a living text. A lighthouse in the storm. A warning bell. A whale-shaped mirror reflecting our fears, failures, and persistent hope.

The Whale in the Classroom

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

The classroom, as Sachs and Mason both suggest, becomes a site of literary resurrection. In prison education programs, students discover themselves in the “Extracts”—not despite their difficulty, but because of it. The very act of grappling with Melville’s arcane references, strange structures, and encyclopedic digressions becomes an act of reclamation.

To teach Moby-Dick in a prison is to raise a sunken ship. Its sentences, like salvaged artifacts, reveal new meaning. Forgotten knowledge becomes fuel for rediscovery. Students, many of whom have been dismissed by society, see in Melville’s endless inquiry a validation of their own intelligence and complexity.

Harold Bloom taught Moby-Dick the same way. Every reading was new. No fixed script, only the swell of thought. He modeled Melville’s method: trust the reader, trust the text, trust the mystery.

The whale resists capture—literal and interpretive. It is not a symbol with a key, but a question without an answer. That resistance is what makes Moby-Dick enduring. It insists on being re-read. Re-thought. Re-discovered.

The Archive That Breathes

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Taken together, the voices of Wyatt Mason, Harold Bloom, Richard J. King, and Aaron Sachs reveal Moby-Dick as something more than literature. It is a breathing archive—a repository of imagination, inquiry, and paradox.

Within its pages dwell theologies and taxonomies, drama and digression, sermons and sea shanties. It houses the ethical weight of ecology, the fury of Ahab, the wonder of Ishmael, and the ghosts of Melville’s century. It defies genre, resists reduction, and insists on complexity.

Melville did not write to close arguments but to open them. He did not believe in neat endings. His whale is the quintessential “true place”: uncapturable, immeasurable, endlessly sublime.

And yet we return. We keep hunting—not with harpoons, but with attention. With interpretation. With awe.

A Final Breach

What, then, do we do with Moby-Dick in the twenty-first century? How do we reconcile Ahab’s consuming fury with Ishmael’s contemplative awe? How do we carry Bloom’s Prometheus, King’s Leviathan, Sachs’s resurrected Melville, and Mason’s classroom in a single imagination?

We read. We reread. We become “sub-sub-librarians”—archivists of ambiguity, curators of complexity. We do not read Moby-Dick for closure. We read it to learn how to remain open—to contradiction, to paradox, to mystery.

But what if we, like Captain Ahab, set off to find Moby Dick and never found the whale?

What if all our intellectual harpoons missed their mark? What if the whale was never there to begin with—not as symbol, not as certainty, not as prize?

Would we call that failure?

Or might we discover, like Ishmael adrift on the coffin-raft, that survival is not about conquest, but endurance? That truth lives not in the kill, but in the quest?

Perhaps Melville’s greatest lesson is that the whale must never be caught. Its sublimity lies in its elusiveness—in its capacity to remain just beyond the reach of definition, control, and meaning. It breaches in metaphor. It disappears in digression. It waits—not to be captured, but to be considered.

We will never catch it. But we must keep following.

For in the following, we become something more than readers.
We become seekers.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY INTELLICUREAN UTILIZING AI

Book Reviews, Books, Essays, Politics

“Why Socialism”: Albert Einstein’s Resplendent Impertinence of Genius

Oscar Wilde’s barbed wit and George Bernard Shaw’s moral seriousness, of a review of John Bellamy Foster’s “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay” as it would appear in an esteemed magazine or journal.

In an era where celebrity chatter often drowns out meaningful discourse—ephemeral as the pixels that transmit it—it is both refreshing and necessary to recall that Albert Einstein was not merely a demigod of science, floating above the affairs of humankind. He was a thinker with moral conviction and intellectual courage. John Bellamy Foster’s timely volume, Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay (Monthly Review, July 2025), excavates an overlooked manifesto whose radical clarity remains provocatively undiminished by time.

Unpacking Einstein’s Socialist Vision

More than seventy-five years have passed since Einstein contributed his essay Why Socialism? to the inaugural issue of Monthly Review in May 1949—right in the throes of America’s Red Scare. In that climate of ideological hysteria, even reason itself was suspect. Yet Einstein, with characteristic directness, named capitalism as the source of modern spiritual and economic malaise. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society,” he wrote, “is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.”

This was no armchair abstraction. It was an act of moral and intellectual defiance in an era of conformity. Rather than tempering his critique to placate the political climate, Einstein diagnosed capitalism as a system that cripples the individual, erodes social cohesion, and mistakes profit for purpose. His socialism, then, was not bureaucratic dogma, but a humane vision: a call for solidarity, responsibility, and human dignity.

Foster’s introduction accomplishes three critical feats. First, it confirms Einstein’s consistent—if unfashionable—commitment to socialist ideals. Second, it situates Why Socialism? within a contemporary moment of deepening ecological and geopolitical crisis, not unlike the postwar anxieties Einstein addressed. Third, and most compellingly, Foster refuses to treat Einstein’s words as nostalgic artifacts. Instead, he reads them as instruments of moral interrogation for the present.

Einstein’s Moral Urgency in a Cynical Age

A powerful moment recounted in Foster’s commentary draws from a recently unearthed interview transcript titled, YES, ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS A SOCIALIST. In it, Einstein recounts a chilling conversation: a friend, contemplating nuclear annihilation, casually asks why Einstein is so concerned about humanity’s extinction. The question is as nihilistic as it is sincere—eerily prefiguring today’s fatalism disguised as realism.

Einstein’s response was telling. He saw this resignation not as philosophical sophistication, but as a symptom of capitalism’s emotional deadening. A world driven by profit, he argued, had alienated people not only from one another but from their very capacity to find joy. “The naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of life,” he mourned, had become a casualty. The resulting solitude, he observed, was not noble introspection but a prison built of egotism and insecurity.

In Why Socialism?, Einstein extends this observation: “Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being… As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings… and to improve their conditions of life.” The essay thus offers not just an economic critique, but a portrait of the spiritual crisis induced by capitalism.

A Socialism of Decency, Not Dogma

Einstein did not envision socialism as the rigid apparatus of state control feared by his critics. Instead, he imagined a cultural and moral transformation—one that would replace competition with cooperation, and empty success with meaningful contribution. “In addition to promoting his own innate abilities,” he wrote, “education would attempt to develop in [the individual] a sense of responsibility for his fellow man in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

This human-centered socialism bears more resemblance to George Bernard Shaw’s ethical idealism than to any centralized Leninist command structure. It’s a socialism that asks not only how society is organized, but what kind of people it produces.

Economic Insecurity and the Specter of Waste

Foster’s commentary reaches its most powerful moments when it highlights the relevance of Einstein’s critique in light of today’s contradictions. Technological progress has not delivered leisure or security—it has exacerbated anxiety. “The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job,” Einstein observed. “Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than an easing of the burden of work for all.”

The implications are strikingly modern. The rise of AI, automation, and gig economies has done little to stabilize human life. Meanwhile, the grotesque spectacle of billionaires launching vanity rockets while basic needs go unmet seems to fulfill Einstein’s warning: “Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… at the expense of smaller ones.”

Einstein’s insights cut deeper than economics. He warned that unbridled competition produces “a huge waste of labor and… crippling of the social consciousness of individuals.” Foster echoes this, showing how the very mechanisms that promise efficiency often produce alienation and redundancy. In a world where millions remain hungry while supply chains overflow, the diagnosis of “planned chaos” is tragically apt.

The Courage to Imagine a Better World

To Foster’s credit, the book does not shy away from the difficulties of implementing socialism. It acknowledges Einstein’s own candor: that centralized systems can create new forms of domination. “How can the rights of the individual be protected,” he asked, “and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?”

Foster does not offer easy answers, nor does he romanticize Einstein’s views. But what he recovers is the philosopher’s refusal to retreat into cynicism. Einstein, like Shaw, understood that history does not advance through comfort or caution. It advances through the courage to propose—and live by—dangerous ideals.

This moral clarity is what makes Why Socialism? enduring. In an era when capitalism insists that no alternatives exist, Einstein reminds us that alternatives are always possible—so long as we preserve the moral imagination to conceive them.

No Middle Ground—And That’s the Point

If one criticism can be leveled at Foster’s approach, it is that he leaves little room for ambiguity. This is no quiet meditation on gradual reform. It is a call to judgment. In a time when readers often seek the past as comfort, Foster compels us to read it as confrontation. The result is not a nostalgic ode to Einstein’s politics but a provocation: What kind of civilization do we want?

Einstein wrote, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented towards social goals.” The boldness of that sentence still stings in a society that treats cooperation as utopian and hoarding as genius.

Foster’s restraint is notable throughout—he avoids both hagiography and polemic. He invites the reader to wrestle with Einstein’s ideas, not worship them. The book’s greatest achievement is that it makes us take Einstein seriously—not just as a physicist, but as a moral thinker who challenged the logic of his time and, perhaps, still ours.

Conclusion: A Dangerous Hope

To read Why Socialism? in 2025 is to hear a still-resonant signal from a thinker who refused to let go of the future. Einstein’s socialism was never about bureaucracies—it was about the possibility of decency, of cooperation, of lives lived without fear. And if that vision sounds naive today, then perhaps the problem lies not in the vision, but in the world that has taught us to dismiss it.

As Foster’s book makes clear, the choice remains what it was in 1949: between solidarity and atomization, between a society built on care or one cannibalized by competition. It is, at bottom, a choice between life and extinction.

One imagines Einstein, ever the pragmatist with a poet’s soul, would have approved.

Book Reviews, Economics, History, Reviews

‘Recalculating The Economic Gains Of Slavery’ (Review)

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 2, 2025):

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America. More slave ships left for the West African coast from the Americas than from Europe; the majority of those vessels sailed from Brazil, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. The foundations of modern Brazil are poured over the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade.

Yet, though the history of Brazilian slavery is not “untold”, the histories of Caribbean and North American slavery are generally better known among anglophone readers. Two new books by distinguished historians of slavery, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic history of slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo and Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic slave trades by David Eltis, offer a correction, emphasizing the longevity and scale of slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic. In Enslavement: Past and present, another distinguished academic, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, shows the relevance and utility of his theory of slavery as “social death”, a powerlessness whose malignance structures slave societies and persists long after emancipation. What follows, however, from recognizing that Brazil was first, last and largest in Atlantic slavery? Slavery existed long before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; are the ruins of the slave-ship dock under Rio relics of the longue durée of enslavement or evidence of the violent birth of the modern world?

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Book Reviews, Business, Economics, Reviews, Technology

‘It’s Time To Question The Relationship Between Technology & Capitalism’

The Mechanic and the Luddite book cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 24, 2025):

With the ongoing dismantling of the US administrative state by a handful of ill-informed programmers, I would like to declare the current moment a failure of tech criticism. For decades, academics in the social sciences and humanities have built a critical edifice that challenged the cultural hegemony propping up the US tech industry, an industry grounded in science fiction parables, speculative fiction, “rationalist” dreaming, and an endless stream of technological solutionism. We can now count “AI safety” as a new field of knowledge production about technology captured by industry interests. I do not attribute blame to tech critics for this state, but now is a good moment to stop and reflect: what are we doing? In being so caught up in cataloguing new horrors of the digital age, we have been unable to stop its worst excesses. We need a new way of thinking about that project, of how we catalogue the problems of technology and hope that corporate appeals or policymaking will address them.  

While there is plenty of tech criticism around, much of it is not comfortable explicitly labelling itself as anti-capitalist tout court.

In his new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite, Jathan Sadowski provides a model of “ruthless criticism” that might meet that requirement. As he explains, many academics have created criticism isolated from the source of its complaints: “Too much of the tech criticism that exists today is happy to ignore, if not remain ignorant of, the links between technology and capitalism. We can see this anodyne style in the sudden burst of work on “AI ethics,” which is content with offering superficial tweaks to, say, the training data for an algorithm without ever challenging how that algorithm will be used or why it should exist at all” (24). In contrast, he calls for more materialist analysis of technology and the internet – that is, Marxism.  

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The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. Jathan Sadowski. University of California Press. 2025.

Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite critiques technology’s entanglement with capitalism, advocating for “ruthless criticism” of this dual system in order to dismantle it. Sadowski’s forthright materialist approach and argument for actionable, anti-capitalist tech critique make the book an original and vital read for our times, writes Sam DiBella.

Book Reviews, Journalism, Profiles

Review: Graydon Carter’s Wild Ride Through A Golden Age Of Magazines

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (March 15, 2025):

Style is said to be singular, which makes it difficult to define. It is personal, though its appreciation can be broad, and it is not the same as fashion—many people hold the terms to be opposed. Generally speaking, it rises from confidence in being one thing and not another, and in knowing when to join and when to pull back from the pack. The great promulgator of style, through much of the previous century, was the editor of magazines.

Across the twentieth century, New York magazines were powerful convening spaces—not just for readers but for journalists, artists, photographers, and literary writers. 

Graydon Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal life (he dresses well) and in his expansive vision of creative work. At Vanity Fair, Carter gave the movie industry a layer of polish and championed a particular idea of the good life—affluent and lush, yet seriously engaged in the world. As a New York restaurateur, he helped to promote a certain kind of refined dining: intimate, convivial, and bound to specific neighborhoods. And, as a power player, he remains a background impresario, helping to launch movies, shape events, and assemble people. All these activities are exercises in style, and all, in his telling, grew from his editorial work during an especially prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. That era is the subject of the memoir “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” (Penguin Press), which Carter has written with the ghostwriter James Fox.

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Commercial culture and electoral politics share a basic truth: people want to feel a little rich, a little powerful. They want to brush against magic and mystery—rooms within rooms—and to move through a surprising, expansive world. Over the years, so many creative enterprises have been stripped of these qualities, leaving them lustreless and diminished. The paths of people like Carter are a measure of the golden age lost. But their memories are proof of the promise that remains. ♦

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Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.

Book Reviews, Philosophy, Reviews

Review: ‘Hope, Despair And Retreat In An Unquiet Age’

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 13, 2025):

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love.

Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance. In his “Sonnets of Desolation”, Hopkins fought against it; and the poem that bids us despair was paired with verse consoled by “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”, God. Forced to choose between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, the well-adjusted opt for optimistic hope.

PESSIMISM, QUIETISM AND NATURE AS REFUGE by David E. Cooper

HOPEFUL PESSIMISM by Mara van der Lugt

Two recent books take issue with this upbeat orientation. Both defend pessimism, though to very different ends. Their arguments are timely. The past ten years have made it hard to be optimistic about humanity. We’ve squandered our best chance to confront the coming climate chaos – storms, droughts and famines that will mean suffering on a massive scale – and the looming crises of forced migration and resource scarcity have spawned reactionary nationalism, not solidarity. In the US, democracy is under threat. The damage will be difficult to repair: it’s easier to wreck trust and infrastructure than to build them up.

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Book Reviews, Essays, Literature, Travel

Literature & Travel: ‘The Light And The Poverty’

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (LARB):

ONE DAY IN SUMMER, I took in the washing from the balcony of my flat in Central Athens. Wildfires had been raging on the outskirts of the city and I didn’t want my sheets to smell like smoke. All day, I’d been receiving messages from the government urging me to stay inside—messages, too, from visitors in town on their way to or from the islands, friends and friends-of, urging me out for a drink or a meal.

I paused to take in the view: an abandoned lot and a litter of inbred, cross-eyed cats, a street devoid of people, save for tourists and the unhoused, and that gauzy, yellow sky which I have grown to associate with summer in Greece. I went back inside, shut the windows, and returned to work on this essay, which began with a question I posed a few months prior, in the WhatsApp group for Salad Days, a reading series I run with my wife and a Greek writer and translator: “In the last 10 years, have more Greek novels been translated into English, or have there been more novels written by foreigners but set in Greece?”

Over the course of a few hours, we traded titles back and forth, before tallying up the results (dated here by their appearance in English):

Greeks: Amanda Michalopolou’s God’s Wife (2019) and Why I Killed My Best Friend (2014); Christos Chrissopoulos’s The Parthenon Bomber (2017); and Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea (2019) and Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2016) (short stories but close enough).

Foreigners: Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (2017), Cara Hoffman’s Running (2017), Andrew Durbin’s Skyland (2020), Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity (2024).

Partial Credit: Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023), Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation (2021), Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga (2022), Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort (2022), all of which are written by foreigners but contain key sections set in Greece.

We were surprised by the results of our admittedly inexhaustive survey: we knew few contemporary Greeks had made it into English, the linguistic coin of the realm (here and in the writing world more generally), but we’d been only dimly aware of quite how many foreigners had made it in into Greece.

There’s some graffiti near my house that reads, “Tourists Enjoy Your Stay in the Cemetery of Europe.” I think the next great Greek novel will be about tourism, the lifeblood of the country, which is making it very sick, about the “ugly human being[s]” who descend every year to watch the country burn. Us, in other words. And when it comes, I hope the world will take notice.

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Dominic Amerena is an Australian writer living in Greece. His debut novel I Want Everything will be published this summer.

Book Reviews, Essays, Literature

Book Reviews: ‘Silent Catastrophes – Essays In Austrian Literature’

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 21, 2025): Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his flame. Her latest tribute to Sebald is a translation in a single volume of his two collections of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (‘The Description of Misfortune’) and Unheimliche Heimat (‘Strange Homeland’). Written mostly in the 1980s, these essays preceded the semi-fictional works, culminating in Austerlitz (2001), that made Sebald internationally known. They represent something rare in German but common in English: literary criticism, occupying the space between academic study and journalistic discussion. And they say more, and say it more searchingly, profoundly and pithily, than a cartload of academic monographs.

Sebald rapidly became alienated from the old-fashioned Germanistik he encountered at the University of Freiburg in the early 1960s. The professors, he felt, had culpably failed to reflect on the relations between literature and the recent German past. He found intellectual and ethical stimulus in the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and the idiosyncratic, always marginal genius Walter Benjamin. References to Benjamin and a range of psychologists and sociologists pepper these texts, reinforcing Sebald’s own insights.

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Book Reviews, Literature, Reviews

‘In Praise Of Artistic Experimentation In Literature’ (Review)

LITERARY HUB (February 14, 2025): I first read Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a teenager. I was hungry to assert maturity through my reading habits, to bypass YA fiction in favor of books for adults, and so initially its playful visuals made me frown; I associated illustrations with children’s books. Soon, however, I realized how sophisticated and delightful they were.

The squiggle representing the emphatic twirling of Corporal Trim’s cane. A blank page where the reader is invited to imagine how Widow Wadman might look—”paint her to your own mind.” A marbled block which the reader can gaze into and contemplate the mysteries of life. And—my favorite—the iconic black page that represents the death of Parson Yorick.

Whilst Sterne was certainly an innovative writer ahead of his time, it is worth noting that this was not anarchic at the time of publication; other texts published in his era, such as funeral publications, also included black pages as a symbol of death. However, the image was unusual for a novel, and is a perfect visual representation of grief, inviting multiple interpretations—a dark tombstone, funeral attire, a bleak starless night, a black hole of grief.These books felt idiosyncratic, shaped by authorial intent, as if harking back to those medieval manuscripts where monks wrote in calligraphy and included beautiful pictures in colors bright as stained glass.

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Book Reviews, Reviews, Science

‘Can Understanding The Brain Make Us Better People?’ (Book Review)

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 14, 2025)

CEREBRAL ENTANGLEMENTS: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton

A profound and profoundly important book that, using the most up-to-date revolutionary discoveries in neuroscience, shows us how to understand the brain; how it allows us to think, feel, experience and perceive, written by an acclaimed Harvard-trained neurosurgeon.

The human brain! It’s amazing! A master conductor of our emotional symphonies, a supercomputer of intelligence, a treasure inside the “temple” of the skull, where it gloriously shimmers “vivid, vital, jewel-like.” I mean, is it any wonder we’re such a special species?

Sorry: I had to get that out of my system. Books built on hyperbole seem to bring out the worst in me. And “Cerebral Entanglements,” a new book by the surgeon and medical consultant Allan J. Hamilton, is so breathlessly excited about our brains and how they work, about the dazzle of new insights and technologies, that occasionally this reader felt compelled to take a break and fan herself.

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Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. and the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”