Reviews and News:
According to The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post, Brit Bennett’s The Mothers is a novel about race. But it’s primarily about the tragedy of abortion.
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Memoir of a pro-life activist: “During the past few years, there have been several fine books chronicling different aspects of the pro-life movement. Dr. and Mrs. Jack Willke’s Abortion and the Pro-Life Movement provides a thorough history of political and legal efforts to protect the unborn. Daniel K. Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn nicely chronicles pro-life efforts prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Monica Miller’s Abandoned provides information about the 1980s rescue movement. Joseph Scheidler’s new memoir, Racketeer for Life, is a very welcome addition to this genre. While his memoir is not a history of the pro-life movement as a whole, it provides an exceptionally detailed and thorough history of the movement’s direct action wing. A great deal of pro-life activism is political—electing like-minded people and enacting pro-life laws. However, some pro-lifers have pursued a strategy of direct action where they engage in public demonstrations either to dissuade women from seeking abortions or to shift public opinion in a more pro-life direction. Scheidler can be thought of as the father of the direct action wing of the pro-life movement.”
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In Once Upon a Time in the East, Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo “recalls the fatalism that enveloped her lonely and troubled childhood in south-eastern China: ‘Silence was the way we communicated, a family tradition carried down to my brother and me from my parents and their parents . . . Never mention the tragedies, and never question them. Move on, get on with life, since you couldn’t change the fact of your birth.’ The facts of her birth may have presented too many obstacles for most. Given away as a baby, then returned to her destitute grandparents and finally to her parents, Guo hunted birds and toads to avoid starvation and from the age of 12 was often abused and raped on her way home from school. Nevertheless, although she was illiterate until the age of eight and lived without glasses for her severe myopia until she was 20, Guo won one of 11 places – out of 7,000 applications – to study at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. By the time she was 40, she had made 12 films, written ten books (five of them in English) and been selected as one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. This autobiography is her account of fiery, artistic defiance and a testament to the act of storytelling as a way to break the silence.”
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“You don’t have to worry, everyone. She didn’t bring the conservative with her.”
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Egypt’s unfinished revolution.
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400-year-old shopping list discovered at Knole House in Kent. (HT: David Davis)
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Essay of the Day:
Letters by poets can often be revealing, but will there be any in the future? Nancy Campbell on the pleasures and endurance of letters in The Times Literary Supplement:
Towards the end of her life, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her pianist friends Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale from Ouro Preto, Brazil. She was planning an unusual seminar series at Harvard: the subject was to be ‘Just letters – as an art form or something’. She asked their advice, explaining, ‘I’m hoping to select a nicely incongruous assortment of people – Mrs. Carlyle, Chekhov, my Aunt Grace, Keats, a letter found in the street, etc.’. The seminar series must have had its origins in Bishop’s own experience of the post – in particular her exchanges with friends and fellow poets during the many years she lived abroad. Yet, writing to Gold and Fizdale, she describes letters as ‘the dying “form of communication”.’
“Bishop was by no means the first to bemoan the death of the letter. Each new mode of message delivery, from the penny post to the telegram, has been seen to threaten the art of correspondence. Hugh Haughton, in Letter Writing Among Poets, suggests that Bishop’s inverted commas were a quiet acknowledgement that her statement was already a cliché. The fifteen essays in this volume consider letters written during the past two centuries, and shed light on the state of correspondence today. The editor, Jonathan Ellis, offers a gentle admonition to critics who mourn the ‘lost world’ before the internet (in the words of Rebecca Solnit), a time when everyone wrote at length and thought in depth. The electronic communications disparaged by Solnit and other writers can be seen as a development of the desire to ‘connect people across time and space’, and one day may seem just as remarkable. Even so, the current nostalgia for letters has given rise to a number of books on the subject, both popular and academic.”
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Photo: Chess pieces
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Poem: Amie Sharp, “West Tennessee, 1980”
