Front Table 5/19/23

On This Week's Front Table, we encounter narratives about the histories of artists and philosophers, to the the narrative of disease - whether that's the disease of racial inequalities in regards to the exploitative nature of the fast food industry,  to the effects of AIDS on the body and the effect of ignoring the impact of AIDS on the queer community to how our society has been shaped by eight major pandemics and diseases over the past sixty thousand years. Find this and more at semcoop.com.

Blue 
(David Zwirner Books)
Derek Jarman 

Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue is a daring and powerful work of art. The film and its script, as reproduced in this volume, serve as an impassioned response to the lack of political engagement with the AIDS crisis. Jarman's Blue moves through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical. Stories of quotidian life--getting coffee, reading the newspaper, and walking down the sidewalk--escalate to visions of Marco Polo, the Taj Mahal, or blue fighting yellow. Facing death and a cascade of pills, Jarman presents his illness in delirium and metaphors. He contemplates the physicality of emotions in lyrical prose as he grounds this story in the constant return to Blue--a color, a feeling, a funk. Michael Charlesworth's compelling introduction brings Blue into conversation with Jarman's visual paintings.

Once Upon a Prime
(Flatiron Books)
Sarah Hurt 

We often think of mathematics and literature as polar opposites. But what if, instead, they were fundamentally linked? In Professor Sarah Hurt's clear, insightful, laugh-out-loud funny debut, Once Upon a Prime, shows us the myriad connections between math and literature, and how understanding those connections can enhance our enjoyment of both. Did you know, for instance, that Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry? That James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness novels are deliberately checkered with mathematical references? From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Professor Hart shows how math and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe. For fans of Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, an exploration of the many ways mathematics can transform our understanding of literature and vice versa, by the first woman to hold England's oldest mathematical chair.

White Burgers, Black Cash 
(University of Minnesota Press)
Naa Oyo Kwate

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers,Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.  White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Deeply researched, grippingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in the closest thing Americans have to a national meal.

Martin Heidegger's Changing Destinies
(Yale University Press)
Guillaume Payen

In this biography of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), now available in English, historian Guillaume Payen synthesizes the connections between the German philosopher's life and work. Critically, but without polemics, he creates a portrait of Heidegger in his time, using all available sources--lectures, letters, and the notorious "black notebooks." Payen chronicles Heidegger's "Changing Destinies" after the First World War, an uncompromising Catholicism gave way to a vigorous striving for a philosophical revolution--fertile ground for National Socialism. Heidegger was a great philosopher and teacher who cultivated friendships and love affairs with Jews but also was an anti-Semitic nationalist who lamented the "Judaization of German intellectual life." The book reflects a life of light and shadow.

Justice By Means of Democracy
(University of Chicago Press) 
Danielle Allen

In a time of great social and political turmoil, when many residents of the leading democracies question the ability of their governments to deal fairly and competently with serious public issues, and when power seems more and more to rest with the wealthy few, this book reconsiders the very foundations of democracy and justice. Scholar and writer Danielle Allen argues that the surest path to a just society in which all are given the support necessary to flourish is the protection of political equality; that justice is best achieved by means of democracy; and that the social ideals and organizational design principles that flow from recognizing political equality and democracy as fundamental to human well-being provide an alternative framework not only for justice but also for political economy. Allen identifies this paradigm-changing new framework as "power-sharing liberalism." By showing how we all might fully share power and responsibility across the three sectors of politics, the economy, and society, Allen advances a culture of civic engagement and empowerment, revealing the universal benefits of an effective government in which all participate on equal terms.


Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues
(Crown Publishing Group)
Jonathan Kennedy 

In Pathogenesis, Professor Jonathan Kennedy offers a sweeping look at how the major transformations in history--from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism--have been shaped not by humans but by germs. Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world's major religions. By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past--and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.

Chita 
(HarperOne)
Chita Rivera 

She was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero--until the entertainment world renamed her. But Dolores--the irreverent side of the sensual, dark and ferocious Chita -was always present center stage, and was influential in creating some of Broadway most iconic and acclaimed roles, including Anita in West Side Story' the part that made her a star--Rosie in Bye Bye, Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Written in gratitude to her longstanding fans and with the hope that new generations may learn from her extraordinary experience, Chita takes us behind the curtain to reveal the highs and lows of one extraordinary showbusiness career--the creative fermentation, the ego clashes, the miraculous discoveries, the exhilaration when it all went right, and the disappointment when it all went wrong. This colorful and entertaining memoir--as vital and captivating as Chita herself--is the unforgettable and engrossing personal story of a performer who blazed her own trail and inspired countless performers to forge their own unique path to success.