Front Table 7/28/23

On This Week's Front Table, delve into a daring new work of sociology exploring disability, marvel at a literary classic in a newly available translation, and probe life on our planet from the microscopic to an epochal world map.

Crip Negativity
(University of Minnesota Press)
J. Logan Smilges

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.


Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable
(Princeton University Press) 
Paul G. Falkowski

For almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of Earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Life’s Engines takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible—and how human life today would cease to exist without them. A vibrantly entertaining book about the microbes that support our very existence, Life’s Engines will inspire wonder about these elegantly complex nanomachines that have driven life since its origin. 


The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic
(Oxford University Press)
Jean-Manuel Roubineau, tr. Malcolm DeBevoise, edited by Phillip Mitsis

The ancient philosopher Diogenes--nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates gone mad"--was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his infamously eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. In this book, Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity.


Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World
(Pegasus Books)
Meredith F. Small

In 1459 a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world. Seven feet in diameter, Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is the oldest and most complete Medieval map to survive into modernity. And in its time, this groundbreaking mappamundi provided the most detailed description of the known world, incorporating accurate observation, and geographic reality, urging viewers to see water and land as they really existed. Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths. Here Begins the Dark Sea brings Fra Mauro’s masterpiece to life as a work of art and a window into Venetian society and culture. 


Swann's Way
(NYRB Classics)
Marcel Proust, tr. James Grieve

Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes that con­stitute Marcel Proust’s lifework, In Search of Lost Time. Swann's Way introduces the larger themes of the whole work while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of childhood, hopeless love, and the French Belle Époque. James Grieve began his career translating Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers recoiled from what they imagined to be the difficulty of Proust’s work, and his translation of Swann’s Way brings out the book’s fluency and speed as no other version does. It offers an unequaled introduction to an incompa­rably absorbing work of art.


Poland, a Green Land
(Schocken)
Aharon Appelfeld, tr. Stuart Schoffman

Yaakov Fine’s practical wife and daughters are baffled by his decision to leave his flourishing dress shop for a ten-day trip to his family’s ancestral village in Poland. Struggling to emerge from a midlife depression, Yaakov is drawn to Szydowce, intrigued by the stories he’d heard as a child from his parents and their friends, who would wax nostalgic about their pastoral, verdant hometown in the decades before 1939. But when Yaakov attempts to purchase from the townspeople the desecrated tombstones that had been stolen from Szydowce’s plowed-under Jewish cemetery, a very different Poland emerges, one that shatters Yaakov’s idyllic view of the town and its people, and casts into sharp relief the tragic reality of Jewish life in Poland—past, present, and future. In this novel of revelation and reconciliation, Aharon Appelfeld once again mines lived experience to create fiction of powerful, universal resonance.

Halcyon
(Knopf)
Elliot Ackerman

Martin Neumann, recently divorced, is living at Halcyon, the Virginia estate of renowned lawyer, family patriarch, and World War II hero Robert Ableson. It’s 2004, and Gore is entering his second term as president, when news breaks that scientists have discovered a cure for death. Suddenly, Martin is forced to question everything he thought he understood about the world around him. Who is Ableson, really? Why has Martin been drawn into the Ablesons’ most closely guarded family secrets? Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil? From pivotal elections to crumbling marriages, from the Civil War to the Battle of Saipan, Halcyon is a profound and probing novel that grapples with what history means, who is affected by it, and how the complexities of our shared future rest on the dual foundations of remembering and forgetting.