We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.
Animal Liberation Now
by Peter Singer.
Justice for Animals
by Martha Nussbaum.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 24, 2023): The latest issue features Walter Isaacson’s buzzy Elon Musk biography, which has already rocketed to No. 1 on the best-seller list. Also, gorgeous historical novels from Lauren Groff and Daniel Mason; a remarkable new book about road ecology; the translation of a beloved, best-selling Japanese novel; “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s investigation into the online underworld of conspiracies and misinformation; and Stephen King’s latest, “Holly,” to name just a few.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.
At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”
“The Vaster Wilds” follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.
By Fiona Mozley
Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?
By Paul Murray
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash
By Chetna Maroo
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink
By Paul Lynch
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference
By Paul Harding
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator
Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…
ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan
When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.
The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity
By Mary Beard
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown
In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House
Aaliyah Bilal, Temple Folk
Simon & Schuster
Eliot Duncan, Ponyboy
W. W. Norton & Company
Paul Harding, This Other Eden
W. W. Norton & Company
Tania James, Loot
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Mona Susan Power, A Council of Dolls
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers
Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time
Henry Holt and Company / Macmillan Publishers
Justin Torres, Blackouts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
LaToya Watkins, Holler, Child
Tiny Reparations Books / Penguin Random House
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 17, 2023): The new issue features An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy, New Thrillers, Appalachian Literature, The Good Virus, and more…
In its first half-century, Ms. magazine upended norms, disrupted the print world and made trouble. It was a start.
By Anna Holmes
50 YEARS OF MS.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, edited by Katherine Spillar and the editors of Ms.
I had my first conscious interaction with Ms. magazine as a small child when I read — or rather, had read to me — a story-poem called “Black Is Brown Is Tan.”
Part of the magazine’s delightful kids’ section, “Black Is Brown Is Tan” is about a mixed-race family not unlike my own who go about their daily routines like any other Americans. Though I was young, I remember the illustrations, by Emily Arnold McCully, with acute clarity: the rosy cheeks of the white dad, the short Afro and hoop earrings of the Black mom, and, perhaps most important, the sense of safety and warmth that permeated every page. In our house, where my mother was careful about the messaging of the media and toys we consumed, the “Stories for Free Children” section was always welcome. As for the magazine they appeared in? Well, it was canon.
In Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” a woman who immigrated to Britain for marriage must decide whether or not to return to her country of origin after her husband dies.
By Tiphanie Yanique
A HOUSE FOR ALICE, by Diana Evans
Houses in Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” are a metaphor for family. They’re filled with rooms for sleeping, lovemaking, fighting; contain corridors that lead to areas of welcome and comfort; shelter spaces that hold secrets. And like a house, a family can be burned to nothing and rebuilt anew.
Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.
Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s
Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.
Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing.
Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.
On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, the Half an Hour café, where I wrote for a couple of days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, has also just reopened.
Boomers Daily 