In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard explores the state of literary theory. (This is a free-access link, thankfully.) In the Chronicle Review, editor Lindsay Waters (Harvard University Press) argues that the study of literature in academe is no longer connected to …literature.
“As far as I’m concerned, everybody in America should read Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea. It strips the ugly political rhetoric around immigration and reveals the very human face of this issue. The book came out in 1993, but I think it’s more relevant today than when it was published. More than sociopolitical analysis, though, Urrea has created a heartbreaking, tough and compelling narrative in this collection of essays. (Try to read the section titled “Father’s Day” without crying. I dare you.) This work is a testament to survival, and to hope, but never becomes sentimental. Urrea is a storyteller to be envied and emulated.”
Samantha Dunn is the author of Failing Paris, a finalist for the PEN West Fiction Award in 2000, and the memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life, a BookSense 76 pick. Her most recent memoir, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation, is published by Henry Holt & Co.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Survivors of the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that rocked Pakistan last October were burning books to stay warm. As many as 10,000 books were destroyed before the army intervened.
Related: Unicef distributes winter clothing to survivors. You can donate money here.
Did you read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle-East? (The review requires registration. Use bugmenot.com for a free login.) Take a deep breath, let me walk you through it. Here’s how it starts:
Even those of us who are not optimists by disposition have to admit that there are good reasons for being cheerful when we look around the world today.
Why, yes, we’re governed by an idiot, our civil rights are going to hell, poverty is on the rise, we have global warming, we’re in the process of rolling back women’s rights, we’ve invaded a country we had no business invading, but other than that, everything looks just peachy. Moving on:
North America and Western Europe enjoy peace and prosperity unimaginable by historic standards, and if the picture is less rosy in Latin America, and often tragic in Africa, then one must admit that whatever happens in those places doesn’t threaten global stability.
No matter that hundreds of thousands have died or are dying in conflicts in Congo, Angola, Namibia, or Somalia, never mind the continuing genocide in Darfur, forget the civil war in Colombia, set aside all the AIDS death in South Africa. As long as Wheatcroft and his people are OK, then the world is OK. But, wait, there’s more:
And now Japan is being joined by China and India in an explosive economic development (with whatever untoward social and environmental consequences) that may yet make this the Asian century.
Because, really, who cares about those social and environmental consequences? Fuck the environment, fuck the journalists rotting in jail, fuck Tibet. As long as he has his cheap, Chinese-made toys, he’s happy. Oh, wait, there’s a problem:
There is, in fact, just one region on earth that gives grounds for the deepest gloom. We unhelpfully call it the Middle East, although what’s really meant is Western Asia, the area between the Mediterranean and the Indus, bordered in the north by the Black Sea, the Caucasus and desert, in the south by the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. That region is in the throes of a historically immense, pathological crisis whose character we only partly understand, although we can perceive easily enough that what is already perilous may turn catastrophic, and could yet engulf us all.
See, I didn’t realize that the earth revolves around the Middle-East and America. They left that part out of my geography classes in high school.
If you’re curious what this provincial preamble has to do with Robert Fisk’s book, well, you’re not alone.