Front Table Newsletter 8/26

On this week’s Front Table, walk the winding relational threads of one of the greatest thinkers of last century; witness the cycles of agency and violence turn with new critical theory and an oral history of the atom bomb; unravel your choice of two tales of a sudden odyssey (the options are unsettling or comic); and go back to the root of humanity with a vast history of Mesopotamia and to our hopes of a cure-all for what ails us.

Baldwin: A Love Story
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nicholas Boggs

Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships. 

With Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin's public and personal stories and his lucid interpretation of Baldwin's work, this biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships--geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic--and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. 

Archipelago
(Tin House Books)
Natalie Bakopoulos

Along the way to a translation writing residency, Archipelago's unnamed narrator has an unsettling encounter with a man on a ferry, which sets off a series of strange events. At the residency, she reunites with Luka, an old friend who seems to have included a version of her in his novel. They strike up a romantic relationship as she continues her work.

The summer stretches on until suddenly she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece. With subversions of the Odyssey and its singular Ithaca, Archipelago charts a wending journey back to the narrator's family house — not simply back to a self and home, but beyond it.


Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
(Princeton University Press)
Alyssa Battistoni

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism — and how others do not. 

Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts.


Mesopotopia
(Penguin Books)
Anne Waldman

Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Anne Waldman crafts an investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. She invokes "studying" as the most compelling ritual and tool for evolution and travels to various fellaheen worlds and gleans sacred texts that speak urgently through the transports and telepathies of poetry. 

What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post-World War II: "We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found." Mesopotopia moves toward release and gnosis.


The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
Garrett M. Graff

The building of the atomic bomb is the most audacious undertaking in human history. The road to the first atomic bomb ends in Hiroshima, Japan, but it begins in Hitler's Europe, where brilliant physicists are forced to flee fascism. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky traces the breakthroughs and the breakneck pace of atomic development in the years leading up to 1945, then takes us finally to ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is the panoramic narrative of how ordinary people grapple with extraordinary risks, sacrifices, and choices. Drawing from dozens of oral history archives and hundreds of sources from across the US, Japan, and Europe, Graff blends the memories and perspectives from the known and unknown. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is a singular, profound, and searing book about the inception of our most powerful weapon and its haunting legacy.


The State Drug: Theriac, Pharmacy, and Politics in Early Modern Italy
(Harvard University Press)
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore

From the 1490s, one of the most influential remedies in Europe was theriac, gaining special importance in the Renaissance, when Italy became a major hub of its production and export. Theriac was used to treat everything from venomous bites and poisons to headaches, palsy, and heart problems. Examining this period, Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore shows how a panacea became a vehicle for political power and intellectual and commercial competition.

So essential was theriac that regimes in Bologna and Venice could secure popular support by asserting regulatory control over this "state drug." Likewise, medical authorities relied on theriac to solidify their own legitimacy. Yet as Galenic science came into question, the alliance between politics and pharmacy weakened. 

Offering a vivid window into the political history of medicine, The State Drug sheds new light on the fraught, age-old intersection of power and pharmacy.

The Gossip Columnist's Daughter: A Novel
(Little, Brown and Company)
Peter Orner

Jed Rosenthal hasn't published a book in fourteen years, the mother of his child left him indefinitely, and he struggles to navigate the daily sorrows of their co-parenting arrangement. 

Just days after the JFK assassination, Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet was found dead in her Hollywood apartment. The press reported she was strangled, yet unanswered questions linger. Cookie's parents, Chicago royalty, were close friends with Jed's grandparents, but in the aftermath of her death, their friendship inexplicably ended. Decades later, Jed pores over family stories, newspaper archives, old photos, and crime scene notes, believing that if he can divine the truth of Cookie's death, it might shed light on a mystery closer to home.

Spanning seventy plus years and weaving together family drama and a true-life unsolved case, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter is a singular, comic, and human exploration into friendship and the bonds that sustain us.