Front Table Newsletter 12/2/24

On this week’s Front Table, consider a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Study what drove Vladimir Putin to launch Europe's largest land war since World War II, and contemplate a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised. Then, dive into a magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, and review a dazzling exploration of our wish to remain innocent and ignorant--and its consequences. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com. 

Berlin Atomized: A Novel
(Astra House)
Julia Kornberg

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: "I am not asleep." She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city's powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, and their family scattered all over the earth.

The second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war destroys the city, and Nina, after tracing Mateo's last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another.

Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg's napalm-ic debut--a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.

Good Dress
(Tin House Books)
Brittany Rogers

Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Brittany Rogers's Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty and audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, community, class, luxury, materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming of age, this collection witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences. With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. They also nudge tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?


Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
(Princeton University Press)
Martha C. Nussbaum

In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education.

Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.

In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.

Translated into twenty-five languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space
(Gallery/Scout Press)
Remy Ngamije

Presented as a literary mixtape, Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space is a work of literature that provides you with a modern reading experience. The A-Side, read as one narrative, tells the story of a soon-to-be thirty-year-old aspiring writer navigating a complicated world. The B-Side, taken as a separate experience, features (seemingly) independent and unrelated short stories.

There's "Crunchy, Green Apples (or, Omo)", a story about loss told by the strangest of narrative devices: a shopping list. "Sofa, So Good, Sort Of (or, John Muafangejo)" is a first-person account of a family's history and a long journey towards hope. A group of friends attempts to navigate a recent breakup in "From the Lost City of Hurtlantis to the Streets of Helldorado (or, Franco)."

When read together, however, a third world emerges--a complex, intergenerational, and interconnected world exploring the universal gaping void of grief. Rather than attempting to cross this black hole directly, the collection carefully traces around its edges, revealing the enormity of this cosmic force from the "electrifying voice you have been waiting for" (Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King).

Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
(Pegasus Books)
John Haywood

A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.

John Haywood eloquently argues that the perception of Atlantic history beginning with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but instead were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its peripheral seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. This story is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world's other seafaring peoples, who "discovered" the world.

Informed by the author's extensive travels around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundland's Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness, and the weed-covered Sargasso Sea, and populated by a heterogeneous and multiethnic cast of seafarers, fishermen, monks, merchants, and dreamers, Ocean is an in-depth history of a neglected subject, fusing geology, geography, mythology, developing maritime technologies, and the early history of exploration to narrate an enthralling story--one which lies at the very heart of Europe's modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world.

Putin's Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
(Columbia University Press)
Lucian Kim

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a bloody escalation of a conflict that had begun eight years earlier. What drove Vladimir Putin to launch Europe's largest land war since World War II?

Lucian Kim--an on-the-ground reporter in the region for decades--offers a gripping, definitive account of Russia's path to war, from Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan uprising right up to the full-scale invasion. He examines the Kremlin's motives, tracing Putin's transformation from a seemingly pragmatic leader into an embittered tyrant who saw it as his historical mission to reconquer Ukraine. Kim places the war in the broader context of the Soviet Union's collapse, arguing that it represents a clash between those who reject the Soviet past--like Volodymyr Zelensky and Alexei Navalny--and those who still identify with it. He debunks the Kremlin narrative that the West instigated the conflict, and he instead identifies the root causes of the war in the legacy of Russian imperialism and Putin's dictatorial rule. At the same time, Kim is critical of the West's empty promises to Ukraine, which made the country vulnerable to a revanchist Russia.

Putin's Revenge features insight from Kim's first-hand reporting on key moments, such as Russia's occupation of Crimea and the beginning of the Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. This book tells the story of the lead-up to the invasion with revelatory detail and fresh analysis, shedding new light on a conflict that has roiled the post-Cold War order.

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Mark Lilla

Aristotle claimed that "all human beings want to know." Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?

In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. With erudition and brio, Lilla ranges from the Book of Genesis and Plato's dialogues to Sufi parables and Sigmund Freud, revealing the paradoxes of hiding truth from ourselves. He also exposes the fantasies this impulse lead us to entertain--the illusion that the ecstasies of prophets, mystics, and holy fools offer access to esoteric truths; the illusion of children's lamb-like innocence; and the nostalgic illusion of recapturing the glories of vanished and allegedly purer civilizations. The result is a highly original meditation that invites readers to consider their own deep-seated impulses and taboos.

We want to know, we want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn't feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.