Front Table 4/14/23

On This Week's Front Table,  explores our relationship to history, from examinations of what it means to be 'the ideal woman' in  medieval times to  the history of surgery and changes to medicine to how the entire decade of the nineties informs our culture today to our own personal histories in the first year of the pandemic to one mans everyday musings in the life of a bookshop owner.  Find the following and more at semcoop.com

What Just Happened 
(Vintage)
Charles Finch 

In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami's novels, reality television, the Beatles. What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless--a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.

The Once and Future Sex
(W.W. Norton) 
Eleanor Janega 

Remainders of the Day 
(Godine)
Shaun Bythell 

New from the author of Confessions of a Bookseller and Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops, another hilariously grumpy year behind the counter at The Bookshop.The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland is a book lover's paradise, with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the portly bookshop cat. You'd think that after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to his quirky customers by now. Don't get him wrong, there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard train book lovers, people who confuse bookshops for libraries, and the toddlers just looking for a nice cozy corner in which to wee. Though diaries of daily life, Shaun Bythell has created an endearing and cozy world for booklovers, a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books.

Checkout 19
(Riverhead Books)
Claire-Louise Bennett 

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses-and finds-herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration. Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett's mold-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination and the magic escape those who master it open to us all.

Abolitionist Intimacies
(Fernwood Publishing)
El Jones 

In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work. Despite this, Jones argues, intimacy is integral to the ongoing struggles of prisoners for justice and liberation through the care work of building relationships and organizing with the people inside. Through characteristically fierce and personal prose and poetry, and motivated by a decade of prison justice work, Jones observes that abolition is not only a political movement to end prisons; it is also an intimate one deeply motivated by commitment and love.

Empire of the Scalpel
(Scribner Book Company) 
Ira Rutkow

From an eminent surgeon and historian comes the  story of surgery's development--from the Stone Age to the present day--blending meticulous medical research with vivid storytelling. From the 16th-century saga of Andreas Vesalius and his crusade to accurately describe human anatomy while conservative clergy clamored for his burning at the stake, to the hard-to-believe story of late-19th century surgeons' apathy to Joseph Lister's innovation of antisepsis,  Empire of the Scalpel is both a global history and a uniquely American tale. Today, the list of possible operations is almost infinite--from knee and hip replacement to heart bypass and transplants to fat reduction and rhinoplasty--and "Rutkow has a raconteur's touch" (San Francisco Chronicle) as he draws on his five-decade career to show us how we got here. Comprehensive, authoritative, and captivating, Empire of the Scalpel is "a fascinating, well-rendered story of how the once-impossible became a daily reality" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
 

The Nineties
(Penguin Books)
Chuck Klosterman 

From the bestselling author of But What if We're Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that brought about a revolution in the human condition that we're still trying to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like "Cop Killer" and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics,  and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything.  In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan.  Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.