Front Table 2/24/2023

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
(W. W. Norton & Company)
Tara Zahra

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War. The "Spanish flu" heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The Great Depression amplified a quest for food security and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi's India to America's New Deal and Hitler's Third Reich. Immigration restrictions and racially constituted notions of citizenship became the norm--coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War. Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra's unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. 

Architecture of the Possible
(Polity Press)
Tristan Garcia

As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one's own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view. The ambition of this slender book - which is at the same time a concise introduction to Garcia's work and thought - is to help us grasp and transform the conditions of our existence by paying equal attention to what is ending and what is just beginning, to the dusk and to the dawn. Until we cannot hold our breath any longer.

(Scribner Book Company)
Colm Toibin

"IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS." So begins Colm Tóibín's fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, "the age of one ball." The second essay in this seductive collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and '60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford. Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality. In Part Two, Tóibín profiles three complex and vexing popes--John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. And in Part Three, he writes about a trio of authors who reckon with religion in their fiction. The final essay, "Alone in Venice," is a gorgeous account of Toibin's journey, at the height of the pandemic, to the beloved city where he has set some of his most dazzling scenes. The streets, canals, churches and museums were empty. He had them to himself, an experience both haunting and exhilarating. A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a supremely creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.

LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights
(New York University Press)
Susan Burgess

How did gay people go from being characterized as dangerous perverts to military heroes and respectable parents? How did the interests of the LGBT movement and the state converge to transform mainstream political and legal norms in these areas? Using civil rights narratives, pop culture, and critical theory, LGBT Inclusion in American Life tells the story of how exclusion was transformed into inclusion in US politics and society, as pop culture changed mainstream Americans thinking about "non-gay" issues, namely privacy, sex and gender norms, and family. Susan Burgess explores films, television shows and Broadway sensations as sources of growing popular support for LGBT rights. By drawing on popular culture as a rich source of public understanding, Burgess explains how the greater public came to accept and even support the three central pillars of LGBT freedoms in the post-World War II era: to have consensual adult sex without fear of criminal penalty, to serve openly in the military, and to marry legally. LGBT Inclusion in American Life argues that pop culture can help us to imagine unknown futures that lead beyond what we currently desire from contemporary politics, and in return asks now that the mainstream public has come to accept LGBT freedoms, where might the popular imagination be headed in the future?
 

Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins
(Hachette Books)
Aidan Levy

Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, and a bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called "the only jazz recluse" has gone largely untold. Based on more than 200 interviews and Rollins' extensive personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist. An icon in his own right, his meteoric fame was not without its challenges. He served two sentences on Rikers Island and won his battle with heroin addiction. In 1959, Rollins took a two-year sabbatical from recording and performing, practicing up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge. In 1968, he left again to study at an ashram in India. The story of Sonny Rollins--innovative, unpredictable, larger than life--is the story of jazz itself, and Sonny's own narrative is as timeless and timely as the art form he represents. Part jazz oral history told in the musicians' own words, part chronicle of one man's quest for social justice and spiritual enlightenment, this is the definitive biography of one of the most enduring and influential artists in jazz and American history.
 

Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021
(Yale University Press)
Thomas Piketty

As a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty has documented the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Emmanuel Macron's ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always from the perspective of his fight for a more equitable world. This collection brings together those articles and is prefaced by an extended introductory essay, in which Piketty argues that the time has come to support an inclusive and expansive conception of socialism as a counterweight against the hypercapitalism that defines our current economic ideology. These essays offer a first draft of history from one of the world's leading economists and public figures, detailing the struggle against inequalities and tax evasion, in favor of a federalist Europe and a globalization more respectful of work and the environment.
 

Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction
(Shambhala)
David Hinton

Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event--this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it. In Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and earth: the insights of primal cultures and the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty--but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. Wild Mind, Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.