3/08 Front Table Newsletter

On This Week's Front Table, take an intimate look at the women who dared to challenge the hierarchical world of elite science, an illuminating and disturbing view of the workings of contemporary political discourse, and a lifetime's reflection given powerful literary shape in the refiner's fire by a master storyteller; dive into an electrifying page-turner and a masterful exploration of who and what will survive in a warming world; and loose yourself in a novel of waking dreams. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

My Nemesis
(Grove Press) 
Charmaine Craig

Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more--but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship.While Tessa's husband Milton enjoys Charlie's company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie's wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah's traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to a martini-fueled declaration by Tessa that Wah is "an insult to womankind." As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether. Compassionate and thought-provoking, My Nemesis is a brilliant story of seduction, envy, and the ways we publicly define and privately deceive ourselves today.

The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science
(Scribner Book Company) 
Kate Zernike

In 1963, a female student was attending a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner James Watson, then tenured at Harvard. At nineteen, she was struggling to define her future. She had given herself just ten years to fulfill her professional ambitions before starting the family she was expected to have. For women at that time, a future on the usual path of academic science was unimaginable--but during that lecture, young Nancy Hopkins fell in love with the promise of genetics. Confidently believing science to be a pure meritocracy, she embarked on a career. In 1999, Hopkins, now a noted molecular geneticist and cancer researcher at MIT, divorced and childless, found herself underpaid and denied the credit and resources given to men of lesser rank. Galvanized by the flagrant favoritism, Hopkins led a group of sixteen women on the faculty in a campaign that prompted MIT to make the historic admission that it had long discriminated against its female scientists. The sixteen women were a formidable group: their work has advanced our understanding of everything from cancer to geology, from fossil fuels to the inner workings of the human brain. And their work to highlight what they called "21st-century discrimination"--a subtle, stubborn, often unconscious bias--set off a national reckoning with the pervasive sexism in science. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story, The Exceptions chronicles groundbreaking science and a history-making fight for equal opportunity. It is the "excellent and infuriating" (The New York Times) story of how this group of determined, brilliant women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. And it offers an intimate look at the passion that drives discovery, and a rare glimpse into the competitive, hierarchical world of elite science--and the women who dared to challenge it.

Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehoods
(Oxford University Press) 
Jennifer Saul 

It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more accepting of wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores ways in which such changes--both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech--have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as "88", used by Nazis online to mean "Heil Hitler") serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 "Willie Horton" ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as "just asking questions") take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Saul argues that these devices are important for the spread of racist discourse. She also shows how they contribute to the transmission of norm-violating discourse more generally, focusing on the case of wildly implausible conspiracist speech. Together, these devices have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. This book is the first full-length exploration of dogwhistles and figleaves. It offers an illuminating and disturbing view of the workings of contemporary political discourse.

Camp Zero
(Atria Books) 
Michelle Min Sterling

In remote northern Canada, a team led by a visionary American architect is breaking ground on a building project called Camp Zero, intended to be the beginning of a new way of life. A clever and determined young woman code-named Rose is offered a chance to join the Blooms, a group hired to entertain the men in camp--but her real mission is to secretly monitor the mercurial architect in charge. In return, she'll receive a home for her climate-displaced Korean immigrant mother and herself. Rose quickly secures the trust of her target, only to discover that everyone has a hidden agenda, and nothing is as it seems. Through skill-fully braided perspectives, including those of a young professor longing to escape his wealthy family and an all-woman military research unit struggling for survival at a climate station, the fate of Camp Zero's inhabitants reaches a stunning crescendo. Atmospheric, fiercely original, and utterly gripping, Camp Zero is an electrifying page-turner and a masterful exploration of who and what will survive in a warming world, and how falling in love and building community can be the most daring acts of all.

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays
(Straus and Giroux Farrar) 
Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it--its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?" The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: "life and art." In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knew no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves.

The Absent Moon
(Penguin Books) 
Luiz Schwarcz

When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake, Láios--"Luiz" in Hungarian. Only later in life did he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country's Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home. After being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, Láios ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing, while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents' comfort, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, eventually growing into a groundbreaking literary publisher in São Paulo. He found a home in the family silence--a home that he filled with books and with reading. But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown. The Absent Moon is the story of his journey to that point and of his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. The culmination of that path is this extraordinary book, which is beautiful, tragic, noble, piercingly honest, and ultimately redemptive--the product of a lifetime's reflection, given powerful literary shape in the refiner's fire by a master storyteller.

The Skin of Dreams
(New York Review of Books) 
Raymond Queneau

The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L'Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L'Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale's humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau's great loves, the cinema.