Front Table 12/2/2022

On this week's Front Table, find stories framed against the backdrop of a migratory adolescence to reckon with race, religious conflict, culture clash, and multiple identities - from a mapping of one young woman’s Black diaspora as she revisits her unsettled childhood in order to reclaim her legacies to a young boy’s story of coming north to the promise of opportunity, only to pay the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Find the following and more at semcoop.com

From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where measuring the annual depth of the Nile was an essential task, to the intellectual origins of the metric system in the French Revolution, and from the surprisingly animated rivalry between metric and imperial, to our current age of the "quantified self." At every turn, Vincent is keenly attuned to the political consequences of measurement, exploring how it has also been used as a tool for oppression and control. Beyond Measure reveals how measurement is not only deeply entwined with our experience of the world, but also how its history encompasses and shapes the human quest for knowledge.

A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents
(Ecco)
Mary-Alice Daniel

Mary-Alice Daniel's family moved from West Africa to England when she was a very young girl, leaving behind the vivid culture of her native land in the Nigerian savanna. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing ventures through the physical and mythical landscapes of Daniel's upbringing. Against the backdrop of a migratory adolescence, she reckons with race, religious conflict, culture clash, and a multiplicity of possible identities. The impossible question of which tribe to claim as her own is one she has long struggled with: her father's tribe, Longuda; her mother's tribe, the nomadic Fulani; the Hausa tribe or her adopted home, California. Daniel's approach is deeply personal: in order to reclaim her legacies, she revisits her unsettled childhood and navigates the traditions of her ancestors. Her layered narratives invoke the contrasting spiritualities of her tribes: Islam, Christianity, and magic. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing is a powerful cultural distillation of mythos and ethos, mapping the Black diaspora that Daniel inherits and inhabits. Through lyrical observation and deep introspection, she probes the bonds and boundaries of Blackness, from bygone colonial empires to her present home in America.

Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World
(Crown)
Rana Foroohar

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat, declared globalization the new economic order. But the reign of globalization as we've known it is over, argues Rana Foroohar, and the rise of local, regional, and homegrown business is now at hand. With bare supermarket shelves and the shortage of PPE supplies, the pandemic brought the fragility of global trade and supply chains into stark relief. The tragic war in Ukraine and the political and economic chaos that followed have further underlined the vulnerabilities of globalization. The world, it turns out, isn't flat--in fact, it's quite bumpy. Our neoliberal economic philosophy of prioritizing efficiency over resilience and profits over local prosperity has produced massive inequality, persistent economic insecurity, and distrust in our institutions. This philosophy, which underpinned the last half century of globalization, has run its course. Place-based economics and a wave of technological innovations now make it possible to keep operations, investment, and wealth closer to home, wherever that may be. With the pendulum of history swinging back, Homecoming explores both the challenges and the possibilities of this new era, and how it can usher in a more equitable and prosperous future.

Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph
(Simon & Schuster)
Richard Lacayo

Ordinarily, we think of young artists as the bomb throwers, but while young artists may experiment because they have nothing to lose; older ones because they have nothing to fear. Titian's late style offered a way for pigment itself--not just the things it depicted--to express feelings on the canvas, foreshadowing 19th-century Impressionists, and 20th-century Expressionists. Goya's late work enlarged the psychological territory that artists could enter. Monet's late waterlily paintings were eventually recognized as prophetic for the centerless, diaphanous space developed after World War II by abstract expressionists. In his seventies, Matisse began to produce some of the most joyful art of the 20th century, especially his famous cutouts that brought an ancient craft into the realm of High Modernism. Hopper, the ultimate realist, used old age on occasion to depart into the surreal. And Nevelson, the patron saint of late bloomers, pioneered a new kind of sculpture: wall-sized wooden assemblages made from odds and ends she scavenged from the streets of Manhattan. Though these six artists differed in many respects, they shared one thing: a determination to go on creating, driven not by the bounding energies of youth but by the ticking clock that would inspire them to produce some of their greatest masterpieces.

The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City
(W. W. Norton & Company)
Nicholas Dawidoff

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he produces an immersive portrait of three people whose lives meet in tragedy--victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby. Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society. The Other Side of Prospect is at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life, told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.

Postscripts
(Dalkey Archive Press)
John Barth

Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay--"​​jeux d'esprits," as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth's literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.


Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Devoney Looser

Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come. But history hasn't been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged the sisters' works as his inspiration. With Scott's more prolific publication and even greater fame, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, capturing the Porter sisters' incredible rise to their fall from the pinnacle of Victorian fame, Sister Novelists tells the tale of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction.