Front Table Newsletter 7/29

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource
(Random House)
Sam Bloch

Shade was once a staple of human civilization. So what happened in the U.S.? The arrival of air conditioning and the dominance of cars took away the impetus to enshrine shade into our rapidly growing cities. The removal of shade trees in favor of wider roads and underinvestment in public spaces created a society where citizens retreat to their own cooled spaces, if they can—increasingly taxing the energy grid—or face dangerous heat outdoors. Shade examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life, but also looks toward the ways that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive it to protect vulnerable people—and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.


Via Ápia: A Novel
(FSG Originals)
Geovani Martins; Julia Sanches (trans.)

Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people—the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel—live close to Rocinha’s main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil’s militarized police storm Rocinha as part of “pacification” efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police’s invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year. Told in heated bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of turbulent unrest. 


Classicism and Other Phobias
(Princeton University Press)
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Greek and Roman antiquity has been enshrined in disciplines and curricula at all levels of education, perpetuating what J.G.A. Pocock has called “a conceptual dictatorship on the rest of the planet.” Classicism and Other Phobias shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible.

Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as “the classical” comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.


A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart
(Ecco Press)
Nishant Batsha

At a party near Stanford University’s campus in 1917, Cora Trent, a graduate student raised in the rugged mining towns of the American West, meets Indra Mukherjee, an Indian revolutionary newly arrived in California. They spark an instant connection, and their passionate romance deepens as they attend protests alongside anticolonial dissidents and socialize with eccentric thinkers in Berkeley and Palo Alto. All the while, Indra awaits orders from a mysterious German spymaster.

Cora and Indra quickly marry, even as the United States is drawn into the conflict in Europe and wartime patriotism begins to give way to increasing intolerance. When news of arrests threatens their future together, they are forced to flee to New York City with the hope that they can avoid the attention of the British and American authorities. Trying to find footing in their new life, Cora and Indra must reckon with divergent ambitions that challenge the foundations of their hasty marriage—and their freedom.


Black Soldiers, White Laws: The Tragedy of the 24th Infantry in 1917 Houston
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
 John A. Haymond

On the sweltering, rainy night of August 23, 1917, one of the most consequential events affecting America’s long legacy of racism and injustice began in Houston, Texas. Inflamed by a rumor that a white mob was arming to attack them, and after weeks of police harassment, more than 100 African American soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, took their weapons without authorization and marched into the largely Black San Felipe district of the city. Violent confrontations with police and civilians ensued and nineteen lives were lost. Inadequately defended en masse by a single officer who was not a lawyer, in three trials undermined by perjured testimony and clear racial bias, and confronted by an all-white tribunal committed to a rapid judgment, 110 Black soldiers were found guilty—despite the fact that no mutiny had taken place. In the predawn darkness of December 11th, thirteen of them were hanged at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio—hastily and in secret, without any chance to appeal.

The Houston Incident, as it became known, has remained largely untold, a deep stain on the Army’s record and pride. Award-winning historian and Army veteran John A. Haymond has spent six years researching the events surrounding the Incident and leading the efforts that ultimately led, in November 2023, to the largest act of retroactive clemency in the Army’s history when the verdicts were overturned and honorable discharges awarded to all the soldiers involved. His dramatic chronicle of what transpired—situated amongst the rampant racism in Texas and the country—is a crucially important and harrowing reminder of our racially violent past, offering the promise that justice, even posthumously, can prevail.

Practice
(Picador USA)
Rosalind Brown

In a small room, cold and dim and quiet, an undergraduate student works on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day—work, yoga, meditation, long walks— but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Despite her efforts, she cannot stop her thoughts from slipping off their intended track into the shadows of elaborate erotic fantasies. As the essay’s deadline looms, so too does the irrepressible presence of other people: Annabel’s boyfriend, Rich, keen to come visit her; her family and friends who demand her attention; and darker crises, obliquely glimpsed, all threatening to disturb the much-cherished quiet in her mind. Exquisitely crafted, wryly comic, and completely original, Rosalind Brown’s Practice is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature.

The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today
(Hanover Square Press)
Tanya Talaga

For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada's greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is the unfolding of history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of her country as only she can--through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.