Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Book Reviews, Economics, History, Reviews

‘Recalculating The Economic Gains Of Slavery’ (Review)

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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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Politics, Reviews

‘W.G. Sebald And The Politics Of Melancholy’

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THE NEW REPUBLIC (March 31, 2025) by Colin Dickey:

W.G. Sebald’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have increasingly delved deeper into his oeuvre for posthumous releases. Six full-length books have already appeared in English since his death, and now, 23 years after his death, we have the seventh—and perhaps last: Silent Catastrophes: Essays.

Kafka, Sebald notes, recognized fundamentally that power is “parasitic rather than powerful.”

At first blush, the book risks feeling off-putting to the casual reader: Academic in tone, it focuses on a literary tradition often overlooked in America, featuring many writers who are largely unknown in English-speaking countries. But its focus on Austria—a crumbling empire that slowly but willingly descended into fascism as a means of trying to capture its former glory—means that Silent Catastrophes, unfortunately, is arriving at an apposite time. And the reader willing to wade through the academic style will soon find not only Sebald’s trademark concerns emerging but unexpected reflections on how we might navigate the end of empire and the rise of authoritarianism.

So much of Sebald’s work is rooted in the awareness that though memory and history are mercurial, often contradictory, and impossible to fix permanently, it is nonetheless vital to document and preserve it all, even the contradictions and confusions. For it is the job of the artist—melancholic though they may be—to sift among these contradictory pasts in search of possible futures that may yet be open to us.

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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.”

Book Reviews, Culture, Reviews, The Arts

“Leonardo Da Vinci – An Untraceable Life” (2025)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (February 7, 2025): The portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, more exactly the portrait of one Lisa Gherardini, was executed by fits and starts very early in the 16th century. By now it has been seen by billions of people and is regarded as a painting like no other. Many visitors to the Louvre, where the “Mona Lisa” is displayed, must surely go only to see what all the fuss is about.

Some people feel that the sitter’s beauty is perfect, others that her looks are nothing special. There are those who say, thinking perhaps of Nat King Cole’s charming song, that her smile is enigmatic. But a smile without a known reason is scarcely an enigma, a puzzle to be solved. What is enigmatic is the extent of Mona Lisa’s stardom.

Whatever its source, the aura surrounding the “Mona Lisa”—in addition to bringing millions of admission-paying visitors to the Louvre each year—has contributed to the pop superstardom of the painting’s creator. Leonardo is everywhere. The proliferation of biographies and videos, the ill-researched journalism, the pseudo-historical claims, the blockbuster shows, the promotion of newly touted works that may just possibly be unknown Leonardo pieces—all this is the subject of Stephen Campbell’s “Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life.”

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