Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (March 10, 2023) –
This week’s @TheTLS, features Michele Pridmore-Brown on parenthood; @noosarowiwa on paradise; @TobyLichtig on documentaries; Carlos Fonseca on Pilar Quintana; @wendymoore99 on surgery; new poems by Karen Solie, @RomalynAnte and Steve Ely – and more.
The Good Life
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz Simon & Schuster (2023)
Isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the link between happiness and good relationships. Scientific evidence for the importance of relationships motivates this always engrossing, sometimes moving, study of happiness, grounded in the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Beginning in 1938, the project has followed two generations of the same families. Current director Robert Waldinger and associate director Marc Schulz show in detail how “the good life is a complicated life. For everybody.”
Life
Paul R. Ehrlich Yale Univ. Press (2023)
Biologist Paul Ehrlich is best known for writing — with his wife, conservation biologist Anne Ehrlich — the 1968 book The Population Bomb, which sold two million copies and was widely translated. Its controversial warning of a crisis of overpopulation gave him global exposure. He became a public scholar working with people from many disciplines: economics, political science, history, law, aviation, military intelligence and dentistry “to name a few”, he remarks in his frank, polyphonic autobiography, dedicated “For Anne: Sine Qua Non”.
Masters of the Lost Land
Heriberto Araujo Atlantic (2023)
Since 2000, more than 2,000 people worldwide have been murdered for defending their lands or the environment. About one-third were Brazilian, mostly from the Amazon rainforest, notes investigative journalist Heriberto Araujo. He tells the story of the courageous Maria Joel, widow of Dezinho, the leader of a small Amazonian farmworkers’ union. Joel has fought to bring to justice the land baron who ordered her husband’s death. Based on four years of research in Brazil, the book is original, detailed and persuasive.
The Leak
Robert P. Crease & Peter D. Bond MIT Press (2022)
Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Yet a leak of radioactive water from the facility turned its 50th anniversary in 1997 into a year of “chaos rather than celebration”, write philosopher of science Robert Crease — author of a history of the lab — and former Brookhaven physicist Peter Bond. Although the incident posed no health hazard, according to federal, state and local officials, it sparked a “firestorm” of activism and politics, captured in this vivid first-hand account.
Graph Theory in America
Robin Wilson et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2023)
The modern development of graph theory — which models relationships between pairs of objects in groups — began in 1876 with James Joseph Sylvester, a British mathematician then in the United States. His work was first published in Nature. In 1976, US mathematicians Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken solved a long-standing conundrum in the field, the four-colour problem. The intervening century is described in this graphically illustrated historical treatise by three British and US mathematicians.
Defamation isn’t the only legal threat to investigative journalism. Data protection and privacy laws are increasingly used as alternatives to a libel claim. Unlike a defamation writ, which claimants generally have only a year to file, data protection and privacy actions can be taken up to six years after publication, and there is no defence of truth.
Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the devil, and they saw themselves as vulnerable to interference from human and supernatural forces, to both good and bad ends.
The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits or portraits of other women artists, presenting, implicitly, an idea of the female painter as both a subject for portraiture and a professional in her own right.
The New York Times Book Review – March 5, 2023:
His new novel, “Every Man a King,” is a hard-boiled tale of billionaires, white nationalists and a detective with a complicated past.
“Empty Theatre,” a novel by Jac Jemc, reimagines the lives of two eccentric royals, King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
A newly translated story by the German master explores a father’s feelings for his children in a time of fierce social change.
In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.
Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?
Mussolini’s Daughter
The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”
It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened?
Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over by Samuel Earle
Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10 by Andrew Gimson
Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid by Matt Hancock with Isabel Oakeshott
The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story by Sebastian Payne
Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale
The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952–79 by Matthew Engel
The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron by Christopher Tugendhat
Literary Review – March 2023 issue:
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire By Nandini Das
Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning By Edward Weech
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (March 3, 2023) – Peter Frankopan likes to take the long view. In The Silk Roads (2015) Oxford University’s professor of global history argued that the Persian Empire and its trade routes were central to the rise of western civilization, not, as traditionally thought, Rome, Greece and Egypt. In The Earth Transformed Frankopan’s timeline is considerably longer: he looks at climate change since the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
Euripidean revenge tragedies that continue to trouble us
A revelatory account of the North Sea flood of 1953
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (February 24, 2023) features Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the US and the First World War; @SarahJLonsdale on Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby; @nicolaupsonbook on Josephine Tey; @MirandaFrance1 on the Condor trials; @cesca_peacock on Poets in Vogue – and more.
All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence.
Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting
The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? by Emma Dowling
Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet by Nancy Fraser
It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.
Boomers Daily 