Reviews and News:
Rousseau wrote against civilization; James C. Scott thinks it’s overrated. They’re both wrong.
France’s first giraffe: “In late-1820s Paris, women wore their hair in towering horn shapes, people pasted giraffe-themed wallpapers on their homes, fabric was manufactured in spotted patterns, and one of the most popular colors was ‘giraffe yellow.’ Everything was ‘la mode à la girafe.’ The cause of this frenzy for the African mammal was the arrival of a dainty young creature from Sudan: the first giraffe in France.”
A love letter to Turkey’s lost past: “Patricia Daunt has produced a stunning record of Ottoman grandeur before it’s bulldozed for new development.”
Over at The Los Angeles Review of Books, Dick Cluster offers brief history of Latin American baseball and surveys its poems and stories.
Not sure how I missed this, but better late than never: David Pryce-Jones reviews Mark Helprin’s latest novel, Paris in the Present Tense.
Randy Boyagoda reviews the winner of the French Academy’s Grand Prix for literature—Boualem Sansal’s 2084—and he is not impressed: “‘Sleep soundly, good people, everything is sheer falsehood, and the rest is under control.’ So begins Boualem Sansal’s new novel, 2084. The author, an Algerian secularist, has rewritten George Orwell’s 1984 imagining the oppressive power to be political Islam. The result confirms everything you think you know about religion, politics, and literature—provided you’re a member of the French Academy (which awarded Sansal its Grand Prix) or an average American teenager.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, Devon Heinen tells the story of Ryan Leighton and how veterans struggle with suicide:
“In August 2016, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs released a report on veteran suicide rates from 2001 to 2014. The department dubbed the report part of the culmination of ‘the most comprehensive analysis of Veteran suicide in our nation’s history.’ Using 1979 to 2014 as its time span for the overall study, the department looked at more than 55 million veterans’ records. The information in the sub-study that examined 2001 to 2014 is sobering.
“During that period, there was a 31 percent increase in veterans killing themselves compared with 24 percent for adult civilians. When taking differences in age and gender into account in 2014, veterans faced a 22 percent greater risk of suicide than their nonmilitary peers. In 2014, veterans between 18 and 29 years old had the highest suicide rates. Those aged 60 to 80 experienced the lowest rates that year. On average, 20 veterans took their own lives each day in 2014.
“Suicide is a serious issue for active-duty and reserve-component (reserve and National Guard) personnel, too. According to a report from the Department of Defense, in 2012, 525 active-duty and reserve-component members of the military took their own lives. That number fell to 476 in 2013 and then to 446 the following year. In 2015, the number increased to 480 and then rose slightly to 483 in 2016. Through two quarters of 2017, 246 active or reserve service members committed suicide.
“Put another way, more than 7,000 military personnel past and present kill themselves each year. They are sons and daughters; brothers and sisters; fathers and mothers; relatives and significant others; old classmates and best friends.
“‘This is a huge public-health problem,’ says Dr. Charles Nemeroff, a professor and the chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. ‘Also, remember that for each suicide that occurs, there are a very substantial number of suicide attempts.’
“That’s something Leighton knows all too well. Like so many soldiers, his story is both unique and somehow familiar. It is also just one story among thousands.”
Photo: Mount Agung
Poem: Moira Egan, “Baume du Doge”
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