Ashley Dawson | Extinction: A Radical History | OR Books | July 2016 | 13 minutes (3,487 words)

Below is an excerpt from Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson, who argues that contemporary mass extinction is a result of the excesses of the capitalist system. In this chapter, Dawson gives a brief history of the ecocidal societies that came before ours. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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“Gilgamesh listened to the word of his companion, he took the axe in his hand, he drew the sword from his belt, and he struck Humbaba with a thrust of the sword to the neck, and Enkidu his comrade struck the second blow. At the third blow Humbaba fell. Then there followed a confusion for this was the guardian of the forest whom they had felled to the ground. For as far as two leagues the cedars shivered when Enkidu felled the watcher of the forest, he at whose voice Hermon and Lebanon used to tremble. Now the mountains were moved and all the hills, for the guardian of the forest was killed.”
—The Epic of Gilgamesh (2500–1500 BCE)

When did the sixth extinction begin, and who is responsible for it? One way to tackle these questions is to consider the increasingly influential notion of the Anthropocene. The term, first put into broad use by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen in 2000, refers to the transformative impact of humanity on the Earth’s atmosphere, an impact so decisive as to mark a new geological epoch. The idea of an Anthropocene Age in which humanity has fundamentally shaped the planet’s environment, making nonsense of traditional ideas about a neat divide between human beings and nature, has crossed over from the relatively rarified world of chemists and geologists to influence humanities scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who proposes it as a new lens through which to view history. Despite its increasing currency, there is considerable debate about the inaugural moment of the Anthropocene. Crutzen dates it to the late eighteenth century, when the industrial revolution kicked off large-scale emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This dating has become widely accepted despite the fact that it refers to an effect rather than a cause, and thereby obscures key questions of violence and inequality in humanity’s relation to nature.

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By thinking through the periodization of extinction, these questions of power, agency, and the Anthropocene become more insistent. If we are discussing humanity’s role in obliterating the biodiversity we inherited when we evolved as a discrete species during the Pleistocene epoch, the inaugural moment of the Anthropocene must be pushed much further back in time than 1800. Such a move makes sense since the planet’s flora and fauna undeniably exercise a world-shaping influence when their impact is considered collectively and across a significant time span. Biologists have recently adopted such a longer view by coining the phrase “defaunation in the Anthropocene.” How far back, they ask, can we date the large-scale impact of Homo sapiens on the planet? According to Franz Broswimmer, the pivotal moment was the human development of language, and with it a capacity for conscious intentionality. Beginning roughly 60,000 years ago, Broswimmer argues, the origin of language and intentionality sparked a prodigious capacity for innovation that facilitated adaptive changes in human social organization. This watershed is marked in the archeological record by a vast expansion of artifacts such as flints and arrowheads. With this “great leap forward,” Homo sapiens essentially shifted from biological evolution through natural selection to cultural evolution.

Yet, tragically, our emancipation as a species from what might be seen as the thrall of nature also made us a force for planetary environmental destruction. With this metamorphosis in human culture, our relationship to nature in general and to animals in particular underwent a dramatic shift. During the late Pleistocene era (50,000–35,000 years ago), our ancestors became highly efficient killers. We developed all manner of weapons to hunt big game, from bows and arrows to spear throwers, harpoons, and pit traps. We also evolved sophisticated techniques of social organization linked to hunting, allowing us to encircle whole herds of large animals and drive them off cliffs to their death. The Paleolithic cave paintings of the period in places such as Lascaux record the bountiful slaughter: mammoths, bison, giant elk and deer, rhinos, and lions. Some of the first images created by Homo sapiens, these paintings suggest an intimate link between animals and our nascent drive to imagine and represent the world. Animals filled our dream life even as they perished at our hands.

Bison in a prehistoric cave painting. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In tandem with this great leap forward in social organization and killing capacity, humanity expanded across the planet. From our ancestral home in Africa, we radiated outward, colonizing all the world’s major ecosystems within the span of 30,000 years. We spread first to Eurasia, then, around 50- to 60,000 years ago, to Australia and New Guinea, then to Siberia and North and South America around 13,000 years ago, and then, most recently, to the Pacific Ocean Islands only 4,000 years ago. At the same time, humans underwent a massive demographic boom, expanding from a few million people 50,000 years ago to around 150 million in 2000 BCE. The late Pleistocene wave of extinctions cannot be understood in separation from this spatial and demographic expansion of Homo sapiens. In most places around the planet, the megafauna extinctions occurred shortly after the arrival of prehistoric humans. On finding fresh hunting grounds, our ancestors encountered animals with no evolutionary experience of human predators. Like the ultimate invasive species, we quickly obliterated species that didn’t know how to stay out of our way. The susceptibility of creatures who were unfamiliar with humans is evident from what biologists call the filtration principle: the farther back in time the human wave of extinction hit, the lower the extinction rate today.

Animals filled our dream life even as they perished at our hands.

This filtration effect means that in our ancestral home, Sub- Saharan Africa, only 5% of species went extinct, while Europe lost 29%, North America 73%, and Australia an astonishing 94%. Given the fact that biologists are only just beginning to understand the cascading, ecosystem-wide impact of the destruction of megafauna, it is hard to gauge the full impact of the late Pleistocene wave of megadeath. Nonetheless, given its planetary scale, the mass extinctions of the period are certainly the first evidence of humanity’s transformative impact on the entire world’s animal species and ecosystems. When all the big game was gone, our ancestors were forced to find alternatives to their millennia-old hunter gatherer survival traditions. Combined with climatic and demographic changes, the megafauna extinctions catalyzed humanity’s first food crisis. Pushed by these crisis conditions, humanity underwent what may be seen as its second great transition: the Neolithic Revolution. Given conducive environmental conditions—including plant species that could be domesticated, abundant water, and fertile soil—human beings shifted from nomadic to sedentary modes of food production. This shift happened remarkably rapidly, from about 10,000–8,000 BCE. The transition to agriculture, with its greater capacity for food production, led to a demographic explosion. About 10,000 years ago, around the time of the Neolithic Revolution, the global human population was four million. By 5,000 BCE, it had grown to five million. Then, in a pivotal period as settled societies developed on a major scale after 5,000 BCE, our population numbers began doubling every millennium, to 50 million by 1000 BCE and 100 million 500 years later. This demographic boom was accompanied by the growth of settled societies, the emergence of cities and craft specialization and the rise of powerful religious and political elites. Paleontologists dub this period the Holocene epoch, and it inaugurated an even more sweeping human transformation of the planet than the previous wave of extinctions. Indeed, the Neolithic Revolution must be seen as one of the most fundamental metamorphoses not just in human but also in planetary history. The domestication of plant species and the exploitation of domesticated animal power permitted human beings to transform large swaths of the natural world into human-directed agro-ecosystems. As “civilization” emerged, first in the city-states of Mesopotamia and then in Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica, humanity became a truly world-shaping species. Some critics have in fact dated the onset of the Anthropocene epoch from precisely this moment.

The Neolithic Revolution also generated a fateful metamorphosis in humanity’s social organization. Intensive agriculture produced a food surplus, which in turn permitted social differentiation and hierarchy, as elite orders of priests, warriors, and rulers emerged as arbiters of the distribution of that surplus. Much of subsequent human history may be seen as a struggle over the acquisition and distribution of such surplus. Significantly, writing as a technology emerged in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BCE out of the need to record annual food production and surpluses. The capacity conferred by cuneiform and subsequent systems of writing to transmit information and promote social organization clearly played an important role in the economic expansion of ancient societies. Indeed, writing appears to have emerged in tandem with the transformation of Mesopotamian city-states like Sumer into powerful empires. Ancient Sumer generated an explosion of inventions that would be foundational to subsequent civilizations, including the wheel, the preliminary elements of algebra and geometry, and a standardized system of weights and measures that facilitated trade in the ancient world. The Sumerians also pioneered less felicitous institutions such as imperialism and slavery. As the idea of private property emerged and human society became organized around control over the surplus, writing also became a tool to record the resulting social conflicts. Much early writing, what we would today term literature, in fact documents chronic warfare. In works like The Iliad (760 BCE), for instance, we find what may be seen as a record of the intensifying warfare that accompanied the growth of city-states and empires.The increased importance of warfare led to the rise of military chiefs; initially elected by the populace, these leaders quickly transformed themselves into permanent hereditary rulers across the ancient world. Military values and a veneration of potentates came to suffuse ancient culture, at significant cost to the majority of the populace. While The Iliad celebrates the martial virtues of Greek warriors, for example, it also offers an extended lament for the violence unleashed as humans turned their skills of organized violence away from megafauna and onto one another.

Gilgamesh battling the bull of the heavens. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The violence generated by what geologists call the Holocene epoch was directed not just at other human beings but also at nature. Indeed, what is perhaps humanity’s first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh (1800 BCE), hinges on a mythic battle with natural forces. In the epic, the protagonist Gilgamesh, not content with having built the walls of his city-state, seeks immortality by fighting and beheading Humbaba, a giant spirit who protects the sacred cedar groves of Lebanon. Gilgamesh’s victory over Humbaba is a pyrrhic one, for it causes the god of wind and storm to curse Gilgamesh. We know from written records of the period that Gilgamesh’s defeat of the tree god reflects real ecological pressures on the Sumerian empire of the time. As the empire expanded, it exhausted its early sources of timber. Sumerian warriors were consequently forced to travel to the distant mountains to the north in order to harvest cedar and pine trees, which they then ferried down the rivers to Sumer. These journeys were perilous since tribes who populated the mountains resisted the Sumerians’ deforestation of their land. Ultimately, these resource raids were insufficient to save the Sumerian empire. The secret to the Sumerians’ power was the creation of elaborate systems of irrigation that allowed them to produce crops using water from the region’s two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Over time, however, the Sumerians’ dams and canals silted up. Even worse, as the river water carried into fields by irrigation canals evaporated under the hot sun, it left behind its mineral contents, leading to increasingly saline soils. The only way to cope with this problem was to leave the land fallow for long periods of time, but as population pressure increased, this conservation strategy became impossible.

Short-term needs outweighed the maintenance of a sustainable agricultural system. The Sumerians were forced, archeological records document, to switch from cultivation of wheat to more salt-tolerant barley, but eventually even barley yields declined in the salt-soaked earth. Extensive deforestation of the region also added to the Sumerians’ problems. The once-plentiful cedar forests of the region were used for commercial and naval shipbuilding, as well as for bronze and pottery manufacturing and building construction. As the Epic of Gilgamesh documents, the Mesopotamian city-states found themselves grappling with a scarcity of timber resources. The sweeping deforestation of the region also contributed to the secondary effects of soil erosion and siltation that plagued irrigation canals, as well as having a significant impact on the biodiversity of the region. As the Sumerian city-states grew, they were forced to engage in more intensive agricultural production to support the booming population and the increasing consumption of the civilization, with its mass armies and state bureaucracy.

The deserts that stretch across much of contemporary Iraq are a monument to ecological folly.

The Sumerians sought to cope with this ecological crisis by bringing new land into cultivation and building new cities. Inevitably, however, they hit the limits of agricultural expansion. Accumulating salts drove crop yields down more than 40% by the middle of the second millennium BCE. Food supplies for the growing population grew inexorably scarcer. Within a few short centuries, these contradictions destroyed ancient Sumerian civilization. The deserts that stretch across much of contemporary Iraq are a monument to this ecological folly. Not all ancient societies went the way of Sumer. For about 7,000 years after the emergence of settled societies in the Nile Valley (around 5500 BCE), the Egyptians were able to exploit the annual flood of the Nile to support a succession of states, from the dynasties of the Pharaonic Era, through the Ptolemaic kings of the Hellenistic Period, to the Mamluk Sultanate, and the Ottoman Era. The stability of Egypt’s agricultural system originated in the fact that the Nile Valley received natural fertilization and irrigation through annual floods, a process that the Egyptians exploited with only minimal human interference. Within decades of the introduction of dam-fed irrigation by the British in the nineteenth century, in order to grow crops like cotton for European markets, widespread salinization and waterlogging of land in the Nile Valley developed. The Aswan dam, begun by the British in the late nineteenth century, regulated the Nile’s flood levels and thus protected cotton crops but undermined the real secret of Egypt’s remarkable continuous civilization by retaining nutrient-rich silt behind the dam walls. As a result, the natural fertility of the Nile Valley was destroyed, replaced by extensive use of artificial, petroleum-derived fertilizers that placed Egypt even more deeply in thrall to the global capitalist economy.

Statues of Memnon at Thebes during the flood. David Roberts, 1848. Via Wikimedia Commons.

This history of pre-modern ecocide is not intended to suggest that human beings are inherently driven to destroy the natural world upon which they ultimately depend. While it may be true that humanity’s capacity to transform the planet on a significant scale through mass extinction dates back many millennia rather than simply two centuries, and that the Anthropocene therefore needs to be backdated substantially, it is only with the invention of hierarchical societies such as the Sumerian Empire that practices of defaunation and habitat destruction became so sweeping as to degrade large ecosystems to the point of collapse. The history of Egypt suggests that under the right material and cultural circumstances, human beings can achieve relatively sustainable relations with the natural world. It is the combination of militarism, debauched and feckless elites, and imperial expansionism, through which the Sumerians laid waste to much of the Fertile Crescent in pre-modern times, that renders ecocide so toxic as to destroy the very civilizations that carry it out. The collapse of ecocidal imperial cultures should serve as a potent warning to the globe-straddling world powers of today. Ancient Rome offers additional stark evidence for the exploitative attitude towards nature that accompanies empire. One of the most striking characteristics of the early Roman Empire is its strong expansionary drive. Following a period of political conflict between patrician elites and plebeians (or commoners) in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, large numbers of Romans began to migrate to newly conquered provinces. The treasuries of subjected lands such as Macedonia (167 BCE) and Syria (63 BCE) were looted, and a permanent of system of tributes and taxes was imposed, allowing taxes on Roman citizens to be eliminated. This imperial expansion culminated in Augustus’s conquest of the kingdom of Egypt, which allowed him to distribute unparalleled booty to the plebeians of Rome. He was the last emperor who could afford to do so. In tandem with this looting of a significant portion of the ancient world, the Romans also used their conquests to deal with shortfalls in domestic agricultural productivity. First Egypt, then Sicily, and finally North Africa were turned into the granary of the empire in order to provide Rome’s citizens with their free supply of daily bread. Deforestation caused by the Romans’ agricultural enterprises spread from Morocco to the hills of Galilee to the Sierra Nevada of Spain. Like the Sumerians, the Romans failed to engage in sustainable forms of agriculture, seeking instead to expand their way out of ecological crisis; the arid conditions that prevail across much of North Africa and Sicily today are testaments to their improvident and destructive approach to the natural world.

Roman mosaic. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The people of Rome were kept obedient to imperial rule not just by subsidized grain, but by a combination of bread and circuses. In the latter, the class of slaves whose labor sustained the Empire was forced into gladiatorial matches to the death. They were joined in these bloody spectacles by wild animals brought from the farthest corners of the empire to die in combat with humans and with one another. Lions, leopards, bears, elephants, rhinos, hippos, and other animals were transported great distances to be tortured and killed in public arenas like the Colosseum, until no more such wildlife could be found even in the farthest reaches of the empire. The scale of the slaughter was monumental. When Emperor Titus dedicated the Colosseum, for example, 9,000 animals were killed in a three-month series of gladiatorial games. While there is no evidence that the Romans drove any species to complete extinction, they did decimate or destroy numerous animal populations in the regions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the Roman Empire was probably responsible for the greatest annihilation of large animals since the Pleistocene megafauna mass extinction. As was true of the Sumerians, Rome annihilated most of the large animals it could get its hands on and reduced most of the lands it conquered to desert.

To justify this carnage of wildlife, Roman attitudes towards the natural world shifted markedly. During the early days of the Republic, Romans regarded the Mediterranean landscape as the sacred space of nature deities such as Apollo, god of the sun, Ceres, goddess of agriculture, and Neptune, god of freshwater and the sea. As Rome expanded, however, these religious beliefs became largely hollow rituals, disconnected from natural processes. During the high days of the empire, Stoic and Epicurean philosophies that legitimated the status-driven debauchery of the Roman upper classes prevailed. Orgies of conspicuous consumption, in which the wealthy would eat until they vomited, only to begin eating again, became common. By the time Christianity became the official state religion of Rome in the late 4th century, there was little to differentiate Roman philosophy from the dominant attitude of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, in whose creation myth God grants human beings absolute dominion over the world he has made. Humanity, the Bible and Christian tradition held, was placed apart from nature by God, gifted with an immortal soul and a capacity for rational thought that legitimated the transformation of the natural world in the pursuit of human self-interest.

The collapse of ecocidal imperial cultures should serve as a potent warning to the globe-straddling world powers of today.

This orientation toward nature could not be sustained indefinitely. The spices and other luxury foods consumed by the dissolute Roman elite in their banquets had to be imported at great expense from locations as distant as India. The more exotic the food, the better; as recorded in the Apicius, a cookbook for elite Roman feasts, items such as thrushes and other songbirds, wild boars, raw oysters, and even flamingo were on the menu at elite banquets. Rome could not export enough goods to pay for these luxury imports, and was increasingly forced to pay with scarce gold and silver. Severe economic crises crippled the empire, forcing emperors after Augustus to end the customary distribution of free food to plebeians and to institute taxes on Roman citizens. The empire collected the funds it needed to subsidize military campaigns mainly from farmers, who consequently could not afford to invest in the production of crops and fell increasingly into debt. Environmental degradation intensified, and the empire found itself unable to produce the food surplus on which its reproduction depended. Ultimately, Rome was no longer able to pay its large and far-flung standing armies, and, after a turbulent 500-year existence, the overextended empire fell to the invading barbarian hordes of the north. Rome today is remembered mainly for environmentally destructive achievements such as the Colosseum, suggesting that subsequent cultures learned remarkably little from the unsustainable dominion and ultimate eclipse of the empire.

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From Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson.

Elizabeth Letts | The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis | Ballantine Books | August 2016 | 19 minutes (4,567 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from The Perfect Horse, by Elizabeth Letts. The book describes an American colonel’s quixotic mission in the waning days of World War II: to rescue Europe’s purebred horses from a secret Nazi stud farm mere hours before the starving Soviet army arrived and likely slaughtered the animals for food. In this excerpt, Letts explains the origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp.

A herd of mares left Austria in October 1942. The herd made the 350-mile trip northwest from Piber to Hostau, Czechoslovakia, without incident, and were settled into the Third Reich’s most sheltered stud farm, located in Bohemia, just a few miles from the Bavarian border. Beyond the farm’s serene green pastures, golden valleys stretched toward distant mountains crested by dark waves of evergreens. The Böhmerwald, or Bohemian Forest, served as more than a beautiful backdrop for the farm; it formed a natural barrier between Germany to the west and Austria to the south and had withstood invasion and attack for centuries. During the Nazi era, this locale was known as “the Bohemian bastion.” Among Germans, it was thought to be the safest place to ride out the war, least likely to be invaded from east or west. It was here that Gustav Rau had secreted the Lipizzaner, as well as the finest Arabians from Janów, including Witez. Even in the middle of a war, here, all was deceptively tranquil.

Quiet villages dotted this part of Bohemia, each graced by a Catholic church with an onion-domed spire. Flanking each cluster of tidy whitewashed houses were well-kept farms growing crops that thrived in the region’s rich agricultural soil. But in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of the area following the Munich Agreement of 1938, its bucolic appearance was deceiving. Once a multicultural region where Czechs, Germans, and Jews lived side by side in peace, Bohemia, now called the Sudetenland, had turned into a firm cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich. When the Nazis annexed the area in September 1939, the local German-speaking population had lined the streets cheering to welcome Hitler’s forces. Local Czechs and Jews had either fled or been forcibly evicted. Those who remained had been transported to concentration camps. By 1942, when the first Lipizzaner arrived in Hostau, the local Nazi apparatus held a firm grip on the region, but Czech partisans also operated in the area, finding refuge in the hideaways offered by the Bohemian Forest. Though the border with Bavaria, Germany, was less than fifteen miles to the west, the mountainous barrier made it seem much more remote.

The stud farm at Hostau, located next to the village of the same name, had been known for breeding cavalry horses long before Hitler’s time. The most prominent local landowners, the Trauttsmansdorff family, had historically served as imperial equerries for the Habsburg Crown. In addition to the main complex of stables adjacent to the village, there were pastures in three neighboring villages—the entire establishment covered fifteen hundred acres and could accommodate more than a thousand stallions, mares, and foals. All in all, it was more than twice as big as Alfred Vanderbilt’s showplace, Sagamore Farms, which Rau had visited in 1938.

Rau had selected this expansive facility to put into motion the most exalted part of his grand plan. Throughout 1942, he had systematically transported all of the purebred Lipizzaner from the stud farms of Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia to this sheltered location for safekeeping. He had also sent a personal emissary on a mission to purchase purebred Lipizzaner from wealthy noblemen who raised smaller strings of purebreds for private use. By the end of 1942, Rau had gathered almost every Lipizzaner in the world into a single location.

Austrian-born Hitler’s goal, expressed in Mein Kampf, was to bring all of the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe, including Austria, into the fold of the Third Reich. Just as Hitler aimed to eliminate “impure strains” and combine the different Germanic groups into a single “Aryan race” of people, so Rau planned to use the science of selective breeding to erase the individual differences characterizing the several strains of purebred Lipizzaner that had emerged since the end of World War I and replace them with a single mold: pure white, imperial, identical, and ideally suited for military use. Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp.

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Gustav Rau believed that these intelligent and tractable animals possessed a nearly ideal temperament. But he had a less favorable opinion of the breed’s conformation. The Lipizzaner had some very specific breed characteristics: a relatively small stature, a Roman or convex profile (this was less pronounced in some stallion lines than others), a very straight shoulder that resulted in a choppier gait, low withers (the bony prominence at the base of the neck that the saddle rests against), and a short back. All of these qualities were especially well suited to the art of classical riding, which differed from modern riding in many respects, but Gustav Rau was determined to remold the Lipizzaner according to a template that he held in his mind’s eye.

Rau’s vision of the ideal military horse had been forged in the crucible of World War I. As a young man during the Great War, Rau had served as a cavalry soldier; his abdomen was latticed with battle scars, including a stoma from a lance wound sustained during a mounted charge. Despite evidence of mounting technological change, Rau remained stubbornly antiquated, convinced that vehicles could never replace horses. Instead, he believed that the military horse could be perfected, through selective breeding, to outperform any machine. According to Rau, “The military horse . . . should be noble, but not too forceful, energetic, but not excited.” He aimed to breed a horse with endless endurance and an efficient digestive system that could run on little grain. But the cause to which Rau had devoted his life was being threatened by an endless supply of motor vehicles that rattled off Germany’s assembly lines, each one identical to the next.

As head of the Polish stud farm administration, Rau had modernized the production of horses, increasing the number of stallions, mares, and foals born in Poland year upon year, and feeding the voracious pipeline of horses to the war. Yet horses—living, breathing animals that require fodder, exercise, nurture, and care—could not be fabricated like nuts and bolts in a factory.

As the war continued to escalate, Rau pedaled ever more furiously, trying to produce a perfect standardized horse. He believed that with aggressive inbreeding, he could rapidly expand the number of Lipizzaner without sacrificing anything in quality; in fact, he believed that the Lipizzaner could be enhanced and changed, elongating the back, increasing the height of the withers, and changing the slope of the shoulder. He had predicted that he could completely change the breed in just three years. Perhaps Rau envisioned hundreds of thousands of purebred Lipizzaner fanning out in formation across the German empire, each as reliable and identical as Germany’s BMW automobiles— even better, as they would require neither scarce rubber nor costly gasoline.

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We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines.

Without access to a modern understanding of genetics, Rau’s views regarding horse breeding were rudimentary, drawn largely from later discarded nineteenth-century notions of blended inheritance, in which an offspring’s traits were supposed to be a fifty-fifty mix of mother and father. For example, a tall father and short mother should produce a child whose height was exactly midway between the two parents’ heights. The problem with this theory was that if it were true, then over time, the population would become increasingly homogenous as the blending process evened out outliers. Not only did this not occur, it was precisely the opposite outcome of the highly differentiated forms that resulted according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

When Darwin devised his theory of evolution, he knew that traits were passed from parent to offspring, though he did not understand quite how. The father of the science of genetic inheritance was Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar whose experiments with pea plants, published in 1866, provided the first demonstration of the principles of inheritance. But Mendel’s findings were not widely disseminated during his lifetime, and throughout the late nineteenth century, scientists continued to believe that offspring could inherit characteristics acquired by parents from their environment. Lamarckism, named for French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), supposed that children inherited characteristics that had been developed in the parents— for example, giraffes elongated their necks by reaching into high branches for food, and these longer necks then were passed along to their offspring. But later in the nineteenth century, scientists were beginning to question that line of thought. German scientist August Weismann (1834–1914) postulated that there was a substance, which he called the “germ plasm,” that could be passed from one generation to the next without changing its essential form, discounting entirely the influence of nurture or environment on inherited traits. He performed an experiment in which he cut the tails off six generations of white mice to prove that the next generation would still be born with tails. While the purpose of Weismann’s experiment was scientific and not social, the increasing belief that inherited traits were not mutable or affected by the environment contributed an underpinning to Nazi racial beliefs. Weismann’s germ plasm theory seemed to provide a scientific rationale for bigotry, leading some to argue that no matter how assimilated a Jew might appear, every Jewish baby was born with certain immutable (and, in the bigots’ view, negative) characteristics.

In his approach to horse breeding, Rau followed Weismann’s theory. He believed that purebred horses had an uncorrupted substance that was passed along ancestral lines. This germ plasm was inherently fragile and needed to be protected from corruption from outside influences, such as “mixed blood.” Rau wrote, “We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines to get identical germ plasm to prevent corruption and to preserve it.” Not understanding the dangers of inbreeding, Rau believed that increasing purity would improve quality.

With a modern understanding of genetic inheritance, animal breeders are now well aware of the problems that can accrue in animals bred too closely—one result is that inherited genetic defects or susceptibility to disease can increase. But these insights were not available to Rau. And so, like a painter working with a palette of colors, Rau tried to fashion the perfect horse from each of a million small equine details— the angle of the shoulder, the set of the eye, the curve of the barrel, as well as elements of temperament that once were considered ineffable and not suitable to manipulation: courage, intelligence, fortitude, and spirit.

A chart explaining the Nuremberg Laws, which established a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination. Via Wikimedia Commons.

To lead this enterprise on the ground, Rau had chosen his personal protégé, forty-six-year-old Czech-born German Hubert Rudofsky. As a civilian, Rudofsky had been considered one of Czechoslovakia’s foremost experts on equine breeding. He first attracted Rau’s attention when horses bred in this region of Bohemia had made a strong showing in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Now a colonel in the German Army, Rudofsky was over six feet tall, a bachelor known for his dapper manner and immaculate dress. He owed his love of horses to a youthful fascination with mounted dragoons, uhlans, and hussars, whose silver bayonets, shiny knee-high boots, and colorful regimental uniforms had impressed him as they paraded through the world of his childhood. Rudofsky had learned to ride at the age of ten, instructed with great precision by a cavalry squadron commander. And so, when World War I broke out, the seventeen-year-old Rudofsky eagerly enlisted in the Austrian cavalry. At the war’s end, he was awarded a silver medal for courage.

In peacetime, Rudofsky was a civil servant who directed stud farms in both the Czech and Slovak regions of the country, where he maintained excellent relationships with his fellow citizens. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, like all other eligible ethnic German men, Rau was called up to serve in the German Wehrmacht. Through the patronage of Count von Trauttmansdorff, a family friend, he joined the 17th Bamberger Rider Regiment, later to become famous when Claus von Stauffenberg and four other members of the regiment plotted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Soon after, Rudofsky was pressed into service training carriage drivers at a Wehrmacht training center. A year later, Rau summoned Rudofsky to serve in the stud farm administration of Poland. Rudofsky acquitted himself well, so he was put in charge of what was at the time the largest stud farm in Europe, at Debica, in occupied Poland, which housed more than four hundred mares at its height. Among the horses at Debica, Rau had placed forty-four Lipizzaner mares, as well as two Lipizzaner stallions imported from Yugoslavia, among the few he had kept outside of Hostau.

Hubert Rudofsky was an expert at carriage driving, possessed of an advanced diploma in this complicated art. The ability to drive a fourin-hand is one of the equestrian world’s most rarefied skills. Traditionally, four harnessed horses pulling a heavy carriage or coach required two drivers, one to control each pair of reins. During World War I, the demand for ambulance carriages to evacuate wounded soldiers led a German count to develop the four-in-hand driving method known as the Achenbach system, which for the first time allowed a single driver to control all four horses.

“Four-in-hand” refers to the four reins, one for each horse, that a driver controls in a single hand—the left. With the right, the driver holds a long carriage whip anchored between the thumb and little finger, freeing up the middle three fingers to control the reins during turns. The whip, with a weighted silver base and braided leather lash, is held erect at a precise angle to avoid accidentally obstructing the view or dislodging the hat of a passenger. Driving a four-in-hand requires no fewer than thirty-one separate pieces of harness equipment. Even more, it requires a deep knowledge of horsemanship. One turn-of-the-century enthusiast’s journal put it thus: “To become an expert driver and thorough coachman one should be more or less a lover of horses; indeed a large percentage of the best drivers have been associated with horses the greater part of their lives, have ridden everything from a rocking-horse to a runaway thoroughbred, and had become competent drivers of single horses and pairs long before they essayed the tooling of a four.” Only highly trained drivers, such as Rudofsky, had the requisite skill to drive a four-in-hand, an expertise that took no fewer than five years of practice to master. Imperial coaches pulled by matching pairs of Lipizzaner once whisked the members of the Habsburg monarchy around Vienna on official and royal business. With Rudofsky’s expertise and Rau’s white horses, these same conveyances could be used to display the reach and might of the Third Reich.

* * *

Rau kept his pistol pointed at the SS officer’s heart.

In the fall of 1943, Rudofsky would show off his skills at a grand parade to be held at the stud farm in Debica. The staff of the stud farm had spent weeks preparing the horses for this special occasion. On the day of the parade, a large viewing stand, draped with freshly cut tree boughs and a scarlet swastika banner, filled with Nazi officials and high-ranking German military officers. Lining up along the railings of the grand exhibition fields were beleaguered Polish citizens of the occupied town who had come out to watch the fine horses, hoping for a few hours of distraction.

Rudofsky, splendidly clad in a full dress uniform, oversaw the proceedings and prepared for his turn in the driver’s box. He meticulously inspected each horse from top to toe, checking the brass-studded imperial harnesses as he gave hurried last-minute instructions to the grooms.

The parade began with uniformed grooms entering the vast exhibition field on foot, leading a group of fine yearlings. As they circled in front of the viewing stands, a heavy rain started to fall. The horses’ hooves churned the wet ground into soupy mud, which flicked up to stain the horses’ legs and bellies. Despite the bad weather, the audience did not move. A few people pulled out umbrellas. Most of the officers on the viewing stand seemed impervious to the storm, simply letting the rain soak their wool uniforms and drip off their visored caps.

Rudofsky was focused on the horses, so at first he did not notice that a hubbub was brewing, but soon he heard a commotion. Near the spot where he was preparing horses for their entrance to the field, Gustav Rau was engaged in an increasingly heated conversation with an SS officer. Rau’s adjutant, Rudolf Lessing, stood next to him, visibly struggling to maintain his composure. Rudofsky realized that while the Poles had been lining up to watch the horse parade, a regiment of SS soldiers had moved in behind them. The grounds of the stud farm and all of the spectators were now entirely surrounded by armed SS storm troopers.

The SS officer had approached Rau to explain that he had orders to arrest every member of the crowd. All of the Polish men between the ages of eighteen and thirty would be sent to a forced-work camp to manufacture German munitions. The horse parade, which had drawn a large crowd, was simply being used as a trap.

Gustav Rau pulled a pistol from his hip and pointed it directly at the SS officer.“You have no authority here,” he said. “This horse farm is under the jurisdiction of the German Army.”

Rudofsky watched, scarcely daring to draw a breath. Out on the large exhibition field, the horses continued to prance and dance. The group of officers up on the viewing stand was too far away to hear the altercation.

Rau kept his pistol pointed at the SS officer’s heart. Neither man moved until, with a curt nod, the officer stepped back. He agreed to remove his men. Only then did Rau lower his pistol. A few minutes later, the SS regiment withdrew. The assembled crowd never realized what had happened.

When the time came for the grand finale, Rudofsky sat aboard the driver’s box of his immaculate carriage, ready to take his turn in the arena. His feet were braced against an angled toe box, which provided the traction needed to control the two pairs of horses. In his white-gloved left hand, he held the four reins; in his right, he balanced the ten-pound whip. His back was ramrod-straight and his face showed no emotion, but as he circled in front of the viewing platform, crowded with smiling, applauding officers and Nazi Party officials, the cold rain dripped down his face like tears.

German stamp depicting the four-in-hand driving method, 1941. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Just a few weeks later, Rudofsky was admitted to a hospital in Krynica, Poland, suffering from chest pains and severe agitation. The doctors were unable to find any physical cause for his ailments. He had suffered from a heart condition since childhood, but he showed no cardiac symptoms now. Rather, his symptoms appeared to be the result of severe stress. Upon his release from the hospital, Rau, perhaps realizing that this highly skilled horseman could no longer handle the fraught conditions in occupied Poland, sent him back to his home region of Bohemia, where he would assume the job of overseeing the Reich’s greatest equine treasures: the Lipizzaner.

Rudofsky returned from Poland to find his home much changed. Hostau, a village of only a few thousand inhabitants, was located just adjacent to his family’s home in the seat of a county where the Rudofskys were prominent citizens. The stud farm itself was in tip-top shape, with no luxury spared to care for its precious horses. But the war had fractured and splintered this quiet community. Within Rudofsky’s own family, sentiments toward the Third Reich were bitterly divided. His father’s first cousin owned the local bank and had personally bankrolled the departure of at least one family of Jews when the Nazis took over the area in 1939. His younger brother, Waldemar, a physician, had joined the German Army and was stationed at a field hospital in the Ukraine. His younger sister was director of the local Nazi women’s organization.

As a young man, Rudofsky had considered himself Austrian; his father had been a personal consultant to the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph, but between the end of World War I and the German annexation, young Rudofsky had served the Republic of Czechoslovakia, proud of his role in bringing the republic to prominence in horse breeding on the world stage. Privately, Rudofsky disdained the Nazis. But after 1939, he had donned the Wehrmacht uniform without complaint. In his eyes, he had no choice; the civilian horse-breeding system he worked within had been swallowed whole by the German Army, and his expertise made him a valuable military commodity. But in the eyes of the Czech citizens who had been chased from their homes when Hitler’s forces arrived, he and his German-speaking compatriots were traitors. When Rudofsky returned to Bohemia, now “cleansed” of its ethnic minorities, he found his homeland sadly diminished.

Being closer to home did have one advantage for Rudofsky. Though he did not have any children of his own, he had a ten-year-old nephew, Waldemar’s son, Ulli, whom he adored as his own child. The angel-faced altar boy gazed upon his suave uncle with tremendous pride each time the six-foot-tall officer strode into Mass at the Church of St. James in his full cavalry uniform, the heels of his shined high-top boots clicking on the stone floor. The devout Rudofsky carried in his pocket a military card stating that if he were in extremis, he wanted to receive final unction.

Rudofsky made it a point to keep watch on the young boy. When he stopped at his mother’s Italianate villa not far from Hostau for dinner, he never failed to quiz young Ulli, a clever and studious boy, on his arithmetic tables. Nobody had heard from the boy’s father in quite some time. The adults around the Rudofsky dinner table understood that the doctor might be languishing somewhere in a prisoner-of-war camp, or was perhaps already dead.

The stables full of white horses made a powerful impression on young Ulli. In the winter of 1943, soon after his uncle returned home from Poland, Rudofsky arranged for Ulli and his older sister, Susi, to visit the majestic horses at Hostau. Like something out of a fairy tale, a carriage pulled by two snow-white horses appeared in front of the children’s house, and a handsome uniformed coachman stepped off the driver’s box. His ornate uniform—which looked Polish or Russian— impressed the young children. The driver opened the carriage door and tucked Ulli and Susi into warm blankets sewn together like sleeping bags. The air was crystalline as the Lipizzaner trotted toward Hostau, their hooves ringing against the frozen ground. From inside the snug carriage, the children could see the straight back of the coachman up on his box and the snowy expanses of rolling fields, the Bohemian Forest dark and forbidding in the distance.

When they arrived at Hostau, their uncle greeted them. He took them to the stables so that they could see the white horses up close. Ulli was surprised to discover that when you blew on the white coats of the Lipizzaner, their skin was blue-black underneath. But when his uncle lifted him up onto the bare back of a coal-black horse named Tyrant, the boy was terrified to be up so high and screamed out, “It’s hot up here.” His uncle, perfectly comfortable around the beautiful animals, laughed and lifted him back down. Returning to their home, once again tucked snugly into the carriage, the children were left with an indelible impression of the seemingly magical horses that had been entrusted to their uncle’s care.

* * *

Rudofsky’s farm followed precepts laid out in a book called Regulation of the Stud Farm, written in 1656.

Rudofsky ran the stud farm at Hostau with unstinting precision. Every morning, his valet laid out his perfectly tailored and pressed uniform and buffed his boots to a high shine. At the stable, grooms had already hitched up his Lipizzaner mares. The silver tip of his braided leather carriage whip shone with the well-polished patina of use. This carriage master who could drive a four-in-hand with such ease had never learned to drive a car, and so his upright, elegant figure with the pair of white horses was a familiar sight all over town. As he pulled up in front of the large structure that served as an administrative building for the stud farm, his stable masters always had a report ready. No detail was to be considered too small to bring to his attention.

The day-to-day routine in Hostau was steeped in centuries-old tradition. Rudofsky’s farm followed precepts laid out in a book called Regulation of the Stud Farm, written in 1656. Grooms were in charge of the horses’ everyday care, feeding, grooming, exercise, and pasturing, a job that lasted from sunup to sunset. A good Landstallmeister, or rural stud farm director, would never tolerate a groom who was rough or slapdash with the splendid creatures in his charge. These horses were to be treated with the utmost care and kindness. Rudofsky followed these precepts to the letter.

Every Monday, Rudofsky inspected all the horses. Up and down the long aisles of the stables, grooms fussed with their charges, making sure every detail was perfect, from the tips of the horses’ well-formed ears to the very ends of their silky tails. Rudofsky watched attentively as each horse was led from its stall by a groom who then coaxed his charge to prick forward its ears, stand square on all four feet, and make the best possible impression.

Details of each horse were recorded in the voluminous stud farm books: the horse’s health, temperament, soundness, and physical characteristics. Pertinent information was passed up the line to Gustav Rau. Rudofsky was a consummate expert in the complex details of stud farm management, but decisions about pairings of mares and stallions remained in the hands of his superior.

One thing is clear: Rau’s plan to increase the number of specially bred Lipizzaner was successful. By 1944, the pastures around Hostau were filled with placid white broodmares with frolicking dark-coated foals at their sides. The first of Rau’s new breed of Lipizzaner were being born, though it was too soon to tell what the outcome would be; it would take years to fully evaluate the performance of these close-bred newborns, and several generations before selective mating could substantially alter the offspring. But for now, the German project to reshape Europe’s oldest and most refined breed, to place upon it the unmistakable mark of the Third Reich, was continuing unimpeded.

In German, the word Rasse means both “race” of people and “breed” of animal. Rau’s program at Hostau to produce a pure white race of horses shows parallels with one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous “other” breeding projects: the Lebensborn. At special “birth clinics,” SS officers mated with specially selected women who exhibited quintessential Aryan traits. The babies were baptized in a special SS rite, cradled beneath a symbolic SS dagger while incantations pledged that these Aryan babies would have lifelong allegiance to Nazi beliefs. The horses foaled at Hostau were also given a special rite: They were branded with the letter H, which was pierced through with a dagger. This was the mark of Rau’s pure new race of white horse.

* * *

From the book THE PERFECT HORSE by Elizabeth Letts.
Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Letts.
Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Claire Harman | Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart | Knopf | March 2016 | 32 minutes (7,925 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte Brontë. It tells the story of how the Brontës burst onto the literary scene using male pseudonyms. The sisters slowly came out to a select few, beginning with their father. But Charlotte retained her male identity even in correspondence with her publishers and fellow authors, until tragedy compelled her to reveal the truth. This story comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

When the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.

Six sets of Jane Eyre arrived at the Parsonage on publication day, 19 October 1847, presumably much to the interest of the postmaster, Mr. Harftley. Reviews began flooding in immediately, from the daily papers, religious journals, provincial gazettes, trade magazines, as well as from the expected literary organs such as the Athenaeum, Critic and Literary Gazette. Charlotte had been anxious about the critical recep­tion of “a mere domestic novel,” hoping it would at least sell enough copies to justify her publisher’s investment—in the event, it triumphed on both fronts. The response was powerful and immediate. Reviewers praised the unusual force of the writing: “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time,” “far beyond the average,” “very clever and striking,” with images “like the Cartoons of Raphael . . . true, bold, well-defined.” “This is not merely a work of great promise,” the Atlas said, “it is one of absolute performance”; while the influential critic George Henry Lewes seemed spellbound by the book’s “psychological intuition”: “It reads like a page out of one’s own life.” It sold in thousands and was reprinted within ten weeks; eventu­ally, even Queen Victoria was arrested by “that intensely interesting novel.” Only four days after publication, William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair was unfolding before the public in serial form at exactly the same time, wrote to thank Williams for his complimentary copy of Jane Eyre. He had “lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it”; in fact it had engrossed him so much that his own printers were kept waiting for the next instalment of Becky Sharp’s adventures, and when the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.

Who was Currer Bell? A man, obviously. This forthright tale of attempted bigamy and an unmarried woman’s passion could have been written only by a man, thought Albany Fonblanque, the reviewer in John Forster’s influential Examiner, who praised the book’s thought and morals as “true, sound, and original” and believed that “Whatever faults may be urged against the book, no one can assert that it is weak or vapid. It is anything but a fashionable novel . . . as an analysis of a single mind . . . it may claim comparison with any work of the same species.”

Charlotte could hardly keep up with responding to the cuttings that her publisher was sending on by every post, and even received a letter from George Henry Lewes while he was writing his review for Fraser’s Magazine, wanting to engage in a detailed analysis of the book. “There are moments when I can hardly credit that anything I have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as Mr. Thackeray, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Fonblanque, Leigh Hunt and Mr. Lewes,” Currer Bell told his publisher; “that my humble efforts should have had such a result is a noble reward.” It must have been difficult for Emily and Anne to be wholly delighted for their sister, with their own books apparently forgotten, though when Newby saw the success of Currer Bell he suddenly moved back into action with the production of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, hoping to cash in on the excitement.

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At home, the time had come to inform her father of the reason for the sudden flood of post from London, and his daughters’ animation. Patrick Brontë told Elizabeth Gas­kell later that he suspected all along that the girls were somehow try­ing to get published, “but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not writing letters.” Sometime in November or early December 1847, between the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte sought out her father in his study after his usual solitary dinner, with a copy of her novel to show him and two or three reviews, including one that was critical—a characteristic piece of scru­pulousness. Mrs. Gaskell wrote down Char­lotte’s own report of the scene:

“Papa I’ve been writing a book.” “Have you my dear?” and he went on reading. “But Papa I want you to look at it.” “I can’t be troubled to read MS.” “But it is printed.” “I hope you have not been involv­ing yourself in any such silly expense.” “I think I shall gain some money by it. May I read you some reviews.” So she read them; and then she asked him if he would read the book. He said she might leave it, and he would see.

When he came in to tea some hours later it was with the announce­ment, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book—and I think it is a better one than I expected.” The scene made a pleasantly comi­cal end to the secrecy that the girls had found obnoxious at home, however essential it seemed elsewhere, and Reverend Brontë’s pride in his daughter’s success became one of Charlotte’s deepest pleasures in the following years.

Emily and Anne were not well served by their publisher, and the copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that arrived just before Christmas proved to be cheaply produced and full of errors uncorrected from the proofs. Worse still, Newby had indulged in some chicanery in his advertising of the book, suggesting that it was by the author of Jane Eyre. The reception was mixed, and the coverage far less extensive than that of Currer Bell’s bestseller; reviewers seemed consternated by Wuthering Heights’s shocking violence and “abominable paganism”—even the multiple narrators unsettled them. Not all the judgements were negative, however. The force and originality of Ellis Bell’s book were indisputable, as was the mind behind it, “of limited experience, but of original energy, and of a singular and distinctive cast,” as the critic in Britannia said, while Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly recognised that the author “wants but the practised skill to make a great artist.” Emily was gratified by these few but potent marks of recognition and kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, including one unidentified one, the best of all, which praised the novel’s vital force and truth to “all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity” and “talent of no common order.”

Appearing as an adjunct to such a strange and powerful story, Agnes Grey never had a chance of being judged on its own merits. The Atlas, crushingly, said that, unlike Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey “left no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impres­sion at all.” It also looked pallid in comparison with Currer Bell’s gov­erness novel, which had in fact post-dated it.

But the appearance of two more novelists called Bell—one of whom was wickedly sensational—made a prime subject of gossip. Though none of the published works bore any biographical information about the authors, it became generally understood that the Bells were broth­ers, possibly through Charlotte’s reference to them as “relatives” in her correspondence with publishers, and with the writers to whom she had sent Poems. One of those writers, J. G. Lockhart, seemed much more interested in the gossip than in the work they had sent him and passed on to his friend Elizabeth Rigby the news that the Bells were “broth­ers of the weaving order in some Lancashire town.” Another school of thought, fuelled by Newby’s false advertising, favoured the idea that “the Bells” were all one person.

Her growing friendship with George Smith’s second-in-command, William Smith Williams, was one of the great pleasures that came to Charlotte through publication, and for almost a year she conducted a very open and lively correspondence with him in the person of the androgynous “Currer Bell,” with no revelation of her real name, sex or circumstances. The freedom that this gave her was unique in her life: she wrote to Williams not as a man or a woman, but the free spirit, unsnared, that her heroine Jane had defined and defended.

From the frankness with which Currer Bell tackles the question in one letter of what Williams’s daughters might do to earn an indepen­dent living, it is clear that Williams had shared (in his missing side of the correspondence) many details of his family life and circumstances with his new correspondent, whoever “Currer Bell” was. He could hardly have been in serious doubt that the author of Jane Eyre and of these letters was a woman, but the fiction of her non-womanness was maintained scrupulously in their early correspondence.

* * *

To all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as hereto­fore.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in late June 1848, stoking press interest in “all these Bells,” as one paper called them, who sud­denly seemed to be flooding the market with sensational novels—four in nine months. It encouraged the worst in Thomas Newby, who suggested to an American publisher that the Bells’ works, including this new one, were all the product of a single pen, Currer’s, and when Tenant of Wildfell Hall was advertised in this way—“by the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ ”—the American firm Harper’s, which had an agreement with Smith, Elder to pub­lish Currer Bell’s next book, was understandably offended. George Smith could only pass on his own sense of affront to his author in Haworth by post, and ask for an explanation.

This was a dreadful letter for Charlotte to receive, threatening to ruin her hitherto excellent relations with Smith, Elder and tainting her and her sisters with blame for what had been Newby’s casual double-dealing. She was so mortified that only direct action seemed appropri­ate, and instead of getting out her desk to write a letter of explanation, she set about packing a small box instead and had it sent down to Keighley Station by carrier. After a heated discussion with Emily and a hurried meal, she and Anne set off on foot for four miles in pouring rain, caught the train to Leeds and from there took the night train to London. Emily was having no part in this rash adventure, and Patrick Brontë does not seem to have been either consulted or informed.

Telling Mary Taylor about these eventful few days, in a wonder­fully comic letter, Charlotte described how on arrival in the capital early the next morning she and Anne made for the Chapter Coffee House, not knowing where else to go:

We washed ourselves—had some breakfast—sat a few minutes and then set of[f] in queer, inward excitement, to 65. Cornhill. Nei­ther Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we were coming they had never seen us—they did not know whether we were men or women—but had always written to us as men.

No. 65 Cornhill, the magical address to which Charlotte had been writing for the past year, turned out to be a large bookseller’s shop “in a street almost as bustling as the Strand”:

—we went in—walked up to the counter—there were a great many young men and lads here and there—I said to the first I could accost—

“May I see Mr. Smith—?” he hesitated, looked a little surprised—but went to fetch him—We sat down and waited awhile—looking a[t] some books on the counter—publications of theirs well known to us—of many of which they had sent us copies as presents. At last somebody came up and said dubiously

“Do you wish to see me, Ma’am?”

“Is it Mr. Smith?” I said looking up through my spectacles at a young, tall, gentlemanly man

“It is.”

I then put his own letter into his hand directed to “Currer Bell.” He looked at it—then at me—again—yet again—I laughed at his queer perplexity—A recognition took place—. I gave my real name—“Miss Brontë—”

It is significant that Charlotte’s personal acquaintance with her pub­lisher began with a laugh and a double-take. He never quite got over his amazement at the incongruity of it, that this strange little woman in glasses and old-fashioned travelling clothes was Currer Bell. And she, given the advantage of surprise, was able to make this first scrutiny of him without self-consciousness. What she saw was a tall, charming man of twenty-four, elegantly dressed and brimming with excitement at meeting her. He hurried his visitors into an office, where rapid explanations were gone into on both sides, accompanied by strong mutual condemnation of the “shuffling scamp,” Newby. At the first opportunity Smith called in his colleague Williams to share the revelation of their best-selling author’s identity, and now it was Charlotte’s turn to be surprised, for Williams, her confidential cor­respondent of the past year, appeared in the guise of “a pale, mild, stooping man of fifty,” stammering and shy. The shock to both of them must have been profound, having communicated so freely and equally, to meet at last and have to fit their epistolary personalities into these unlikely casings—one of them female. There was “a long, nervous shaking of hands—Then followed talk—talk—talk—Mr. Williams being silent—Mr. Smith loquacious.”

Smith was fully animated, and immediately had a dozen plans for the entertainment of the Misses Brontë and their introduction to London society. “[Y]ou must go to the Italian opera—you must see the Exhibition—Mr. Thackeray would be pleased to see you—If Mr. Lewes knew ‘Currer Bell’ was in town—he would have to be shut up,” et cetera, et cetera. Delightful though all these suggestions were, Charlotte cut him short with the warning that the sisters’ incognito had to be strictly preserved. She and Acton Bell had only revealed themselves to him to prove their innocence in the matter of Newby’s lies. “[T]o all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as hereto­fore,” she told him.

“You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?” Illustration for the second edition of Jane Eyre. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Nevertheless, Smith was determined to fête them, offered them the hospitality of his own home and, when that was refused, came up with the idea of introducing the sisters not as authors but as his “country cousins,” the Misses Brown. “The desire to see some of the personages whose names he mentioned—kindled in me very strongly,” Charlotte told Mary, “but when I found on further examination that he could not venture to ask such men as Thackeray &c. at a short notice, with­out giving them a hint as to whom they were to meet, I declined even this—I felt it would have ended in our being made a show of—a thing I have ever resolved to avoid.” The sisters retired to the Coffee House, exhausted, where Charlotte took smelling salts—the conventional if rather potent remedy of the time against headache and pains—to pre­pare herself for a promised call later in the day from Smith and his sis­ters. But when the Smiths turned up, young and lovely in full evening dress (right down to white gloves), it was with the expectation that the Misses Brown would accompany them to the Opera—which Charlotte and Anne had “by no means understood.” But, despite their unpre­paredness, and the effects of the analgesic, Charlotte decided on the spur of the moment that it would be better to go along with the plan, so within minutes she and Anne were being helped into the Smiths’ carriage, where Williams was also in full fig. “They must have thought us queer, quizzical looking beings—especially me with my spectacles,” Charlotte related with deep amusement. “I smiled inwardly at the con­trast which must have been apparent between me and Mr. Smith as I walked with him up the crimson carpeted staircase of the Opera House and stood amongst a brilliant throng at the box-door which was not yet open. Fine ladies & gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—Still I felt pleasurably excited—in spite of headache sickness & con­scious clownishness; and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is—”

Also in the audience that night, watching the Royal Italian Opera Company perform The Barber of Seville, were the Earl and Countess of Desart, Viscount Lascelles, the author Lady Morgan and the philan­thropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, a glamorous glimpse of real High Life for the two Brontës after all their years of imagining it in their writ­ings. Charlotte was so impressed by the splendour of the Opera House building and company that she pressed Williams’s arm and whispered, “You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing.” Making such an aside to a man she had only just met would have been unthinkable at home, but Charlotte found herself so far outside her milieu that night that she could behave naturally without impunity. And her authorial persona protected her further. It was not Miss Brown on the arm of dashing young George Smith, nor even Miss Brontë, but Currer Bell.

* * *

Ellis the ‘man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,’ sat lean­ing back in his easy chair—Acton was sewing.

Unknown to Charlotte, the trip to London with Anne was to be the last bright spot in her life for a very long time. Bran­well was sinking rapidly, worn out by the physical toll of his addictions and “intolerable mental wretchedness.”

Branwell died in his father’s arms, aged thirty-one. “My Son! My Son!” Patrick cried out piteously, refusing to be comforted, alone in his room. He never thought that his remaining children might have needed his comfort in return after their ordeal. “My poor Father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters,” Charlotte remarked sombrely.

*

Emily had caught a chill, it seemed, on the day of the funeral, and had a persistent, racking cough. Charlotte at first blamed the weather and the stress of Branwell’s death, but the cough per­sisted, worsened, and she began to be deeply alarmed: “Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate; I fear she has a pain in the chest—and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly—she looks very, very thin and pale.” But her sister was not a good patient—not patient at all. “Her reserved nature occasions one great uneasiness of mind—it is useless to question her—you get no answers—it is still more useless to recommend remedies—they are never adopted.” By early November, Emily’s harsh dry cough and breathlessness, and her frightening emaciation, were getting worse.

Charlotte at first described Emily as “a real stoic in illness,” trying to see her intransigence in the best possible light, but the sick woman’s refusal to accept any help or sympathy or to make any adjustments to her daily routine became increasingly distressing to her sisters: “you must look on, and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word.” “I have again and again incurred her displeasure by urg­ing the necessity of seeking advice, and I fear I must yet incur it again and again.” This recalls “the unconscious tyranny” that Constantin Heger observed in Emily’s treatment of Charlotte that may not have been unconscious at all. “When she is ill there seems to be no sun­shine in the world for me,” Charlotte told Williams. “I think a cer­tain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes one cling to her more.” Indeed, Emily seems to have fully understood her power over Charlotte—over the whole household—and been strangely determined to test it at this juncture, imposing on them what Char­lotte later called “forced, total neglect.”

George Smith’s gifts of books and periodicals diverted the house­hold during these awful months, though the growing notoriety of the brothers Bell, the guessing games about their true identities and the temptation to rank them as competitors were signs of notice more agi­tating than gratifying. From her later remarks about Wuthering Heights, it is clear that Charlotte thought it an immature work that Ellis Bell would improve on, given time; the undervaluing of Ellis Bell’s poetry, on the other hand, was a source of increasing annoyance to her. Smith had bought the unsold, unloved stock of the 1846 volume and reissued it in 1848 after the success of Jane Eyre. But still there was insufficient appreciation, in Charlotte’s view, for the genius of Ellis Bell, especially now that Currer’s novel, the most successful of the four by far, always seemed to dispose critics in his favour. It was hard to read aloud to her ailing sister notices that spoke of Ellis’s and Acton’s “comparative inferiority . . . from the greater quietness of a small or the triteness of a common subject.” Charlotte thought such critics “blind . . . as any bat—insensate as any stone.”

“It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and, flinging both the floor, tramped on them.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

Among the articles that Smith, Elder forwarded to Haworth was one from North American Review, considering all four of the Bell novels in the light of the “Jane Eyre fever” currently sweeping the eastern United States. A feverish confusion certainly surrounded the authorship of each novel—the American editions attributed Wuthering Heights to “the author of Jane Eyre” and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the “author of Wuthering Heights”—and taken together, the Bells, pow­erfully clever though they were, seemed to embody all that was brutal and offensive. The reviewer deplored the fact that Heathcliff’s creator “seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality,” while Acton Bell succeeded in depicting profligacy without making virtue pleasing. Charlotte enjoyed describ­ing to Williams the actual home life of this depraved crew:

As I sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melan­choly fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis the “man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,” sat lean­ing back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted—it is not his wont to laugh—but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened—Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquac­ity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly pourtrayed [sic].

Charlotte found particularly amusing the reviewer’s suggestion that the Bells might be a brother-and-sister or husband-and-wife team (their work bearing “the marks of more than one mind, and one sex”): “Strange patch-work it must seem to them, this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband—that other by the wife! The gentleman of course doing the rough work—the lady getting up the finer parts.” But one can sympathise with the reviewer, trying to make sense of the new phenomenon represented by the Bells. No one had written novels like this before, with so much unaccountable power.

* * *

Dying all the time—the rattle in her throat while she would dress herself.

On the evening of 18 December, Charlotte read to Emily from one of Emerson’s essays, that had arrived in the latest parcel from George Smith. Emily drifted off to sleep and Charlotte put the book down, thinking they would continue the next day. But the next day, “the first glance at her face” assured Charlotte her sister was dying.

Martha Brown told Mrs. Gaskell that on her last morning, Emily got up, “dying all the time—the rattle in her throat while she would dress herself; & neither Miss Brontë nor I dared offer to help her.” Emily’s violent display of denial went as far as trying to take up her sew­ing, though the servants saw that her eyes had already begun to glaze over. This was the fight that Charlotte described later to Williams, and that Emily forced her to witness, “the conflict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame . . . relentless conflict—once seen, never to be forgotten.”

Charlotte told Mrs. Gaskell that she went out on to the moor on that bleak December day, desperate to find any small spray of heather to take to her dying sister, though the flowers were all brown and with­ered at that time of year. Emily did not recognise them. Two hours before she died, she said, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now,” but of course it was too late. Dr. Wheelhouse may not even have got to the Parsonage in time to see Emily die “in the arms of those who loved her.”

She was buried three days later, on a clear, frosty morning. Arthur Nicholls took the service, and the chancel flagstones, hardly settled from Branwell’s funeral less than three months earlier, were levered up again. The coffin was the narrowest that William Wood ever recalled making for a grown person. It measured five foot seven by only sixteen inches wide. Keeper, who had stayed by Emily’s deathbed and followed her coffin to the church, now lay outside the bedroom door, howling.

*

Anne’s cough, weakness and the pains in her side were all too clearly indicative of the same disease, though no one wanted to believe it possible. When Ellen Nussey came to visit at the turn of the new year, she found the family “calm and sustained” but very anxious about Anne. Reverend Brontë had inquired after the best Leeds doctor, and a Mr. Teale subsequently came to examine the invalid, whom Ellen thought was looking “sweetly pretty and flushed and in capital spirits.” But when the doctor left and Patrick Brontë came into the room, it was clear that the news was bad. This most undemonstrative of fathers sat next to his youngest child on the sofa and drew her towards him, say­ing, “My dear little Anne,” as if they were already parting.

With her new understanding of consumption, Charlotte guessed rightly that the family had been harbouring it for years, “unused any of us to the possession of robust health, we have not noticed the gradual approaches of decay; we did not know its symptoms; the little cough, the small appetite, the tendency to take cold at every variation of atmo­sphere have been regarded as things of course—I see them in another light now.” Anne submitted to all the treatments that Emily would never countenance: she was examined with a stethoscope, she used a respirator, she was blistered, she took cod-liver oil (that smelt “like train oil”) and iron tonics, she accepted help walking round the room, she rested (in what used to be Emily’s chair), but still she did not im­prove. Charlotte’s instinct was to take the patient somewhere warmer, but travel was not recommended by the doctor until the weather improved, so they waited out the coldest months of the year on the edge of the frozen moor, hoping to get to the seaside—Scarborough was Anne’s longing—as soon as the weather improved.

The trip to Scarborough finally went ahead at the end of that month, too late to be more than a distressing last wish. The journey, broken for a night in York, was arduous and the semblance of a holiday seemed to Charlotte like a “dreary mockery.” “Oh—if it would please God to strengthen and revive Anne how happy we might be together! His will—however—must be done.” Anne was a model patient, the opposite of Emily: she bore the discomforts and anxieties of the journey with what Ellen emotionally termed “the pious courage and fortitude of a martyr” and, with heroic selflessness, tried to minimise the distress to her two companions. She was also doubtless trying to set an example to Charlotte, whose stricken face must have caused the dying girl deep pain.

Their lodgings on the front included a bedroom and sitting room overlooking the sea in one of the best properties in the town, known to Anne from her holidays with the Robinsons. On the Saturday, they went on to the sands and Anne had a ride in a donkey carriage, taking the reins from the boy driver so that the donkey would not be driven too hard, and advising him how to treat the animal in future. It was the last active thing she ever did. The next evening she was wheeled to the window to watch a spectacular sunset lighting the castle and distant ships at sea, and the day after that she died.

* * *

To you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only.

Almost two years after Jane Eyre’s first publication, criticism of it was still appearing, and Charlotte still felt defensive about it. In August 1849 a review in the North British Review followed the by now common presumption that the “Bells” were one and the same, and concluded that Currer Bell, if a woman, “must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.” Charlotte deeply resented the implied double standard, which it had been her objective to circumvent: “To such critics I would say—‘to you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’ ”

Worse than any remarks about her own work, though, were deni­grations of her sisters’: the reviewer said he could not finish Wuthering Heights, he found it so disgusting, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not much better, with scenes of “naked vice” that he refused to believe possible among the gentry. Such lashing rebukes were “scarce support­able”; Charlotte was glad Emily and Anne weren’t alive to read them, but her anger on their behalf grew.

“And I am a hard woman – impossible to put off.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the long months of reclusion, Charlotte felt she had been insuf­ficiently vigilant of her own and her sisters’ reputations, and a notice in The Quarterly Review from December 1848, which had been perceived through the fog of Emily’s death, now seemed to require an answer urgently. In a long article, which first heaped praise on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the anonymous reviewer (Elizabeth Rigby, the friend with whom J. G. Lockhart had been exchanging gossip about the Bells) had lambasted Currer Bell for his vulgarity and, while admitting in pass­ing many virtues of pace, style and feeling in the book, maintained a harsh and sarcastic attack on the debut novelist.

Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end . . . the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquain­tance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.

Jane Eyre was a dangerous, “anti-Christian” book:

There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individ­ual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment—there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence—there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebel­lion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

However it was the passages that expressed disgust at Ellis Bell’s novel—“too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers”—that roused Charlotte to respond. Her anger on behalf of Emily was perfectly justified, but the nine-month delay in answering was not, nor was her idea—to address The Quarterly in a preface to her new book—a good one. The “Word to The Quarterly” that she drafted had an uncomfortably flippant tone, and targeted the most minor points raised, such as whether Currer Bell had an adequate knowledge of ladies’ fashion in the 1820s, which had convinced Rigby that the author of Jane Eyre was a man.

Smith and Williams did not like the piece at all and asked Char­lotte to change it for something that would engage the public’s sympa­thies rather than stir up an image of a disgruntled carper. They were much more aware than she of her fame, and how such a display could damage her reputation, things for which Charlotte cared little at this stage. Smith believed that a preface that alluded to her personal cir­cumstances and the deaths of Ellis and Acton Bell might provide a useful context to Shirley, but Charlotte dismissed such an idea severely. “What we deeply feel is our own—we must keep it to ourselves,” she told Williams. “Ellis and Acton Bell were, for me, Emily and Anne; my sisters—to me intimately near, tenderly dear—to the public they were nothing—beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepre­sented. If I live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet.” In the meantime, Shirley went into print in October with no preface at all.

Elizabeth Rigby was hardly wrong in noticing Jane Eyre’s revolu­tionary bent, however much Charlotte remained in denial about it. When the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared early in 1848 (just as revolution was breaking out in France, Germany and Italy), a reviewer in the ultra-respectable Christian Remembrancer had accused the book of “moral Jacobinism” on every page. “Never was there a better hater,” the author said of the novel’s angry heroine; “ ‘Unjust, unjust,’ is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be. All virtue is but well masked vice, all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre.” It is easy to see how a book like Jane Eyre could strike readers as all the more subversive because of its surface conventionality. “To say that Jane Eyre is positively immoral or antichristian, would be to do its writer an injustice,” the Remembrancer concluded. “Still it wears a questionable aspect.”

* * *

Why can the Press not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?

Charlotte had said back in July 1849 that, although she felt she might have lost any ability to enjoy society again, she did sometimes crave it, and a change of scene. Smith and Williams were keen to encourage her to come to London and engage with other writers; they understood how useful it might be to her critical reception as much as to her own well-being to emerge now and then from her Yorkshire fastness. Charlotte had no desire to go to parties and be lionised—in fact the idea filled her with revulsion—but being able to meet “some of the truly great literary characters” of the day, Thackeray, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, tempted her strongly. “However this is not to be yet—I cannot sacrifice my incognito—And let me be content with seclusion—it has its advantages. In general indeed I am tranquil—it is only now and then that a struggle disturbs me—that I wish for a wider world than Haworth.” Her isolation was problematic artistically, though, as she was aware on completion of Shirley. Until she heard from Williams that he liked the book, she had no confi­dence in it at all, not having been able to share it with her sisters, or with anybody.

The publication of Shirley also left her very vulnerable, not just from some of the reviews, which she knew she took too much to heart (“Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this notice,” she told Williams of one slightly bad one), but from the frenzy of interest locally in the identity of Currer Bell, hugely provoked by the appearance of a book that was all about the West Riding, albeit thirty years in the past. Charlotte already suspected that her post was being opened on purpose in Keighley, and that her retirement was resented there.

To the disappointment of no longer being able to “walk invisible” was added the annoyance of Currer Bell’s gender always being a matter of concern to readers and critics. “Why can [the Press] not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?” she asked James Taylor, the editor at Smith, Elder with whom she had begun to correspond (and who had taken a special interest in Shirley, coming to the Parsonage in Septem­ber to pick up the manuscript personally). “I imagined—mistakenly it now appears—that ‘Shirley’ bore fewer traces of a female hand than ‘Jane Eyre’: that I have misjudged disappoints me a little—though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.” The most aggravating judge­ment had come from her former champion, G. H. Lewes, whose review of Shirley in The Edinburgh Review criticised the coarseness of the book, and the inferiority of female creativity in general, concluding (in a reprise of what Robert Southey had said in 1837) that “the grand function of woman . . . is, and ever must be, Maternity.” Charlotte was so angry that she sent him a single sentence: “I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”

Even if they hadn’t read Jane Eyre, the reviewers all treated Shirley as a woman’s work, and harped annoyingly on speculation about the authoress. Gossip about Currer Bell had spread wide by this date, and from her sofa in the Casa Guidi in Florence Elizabeth Barrett Brown­ing wrote to thank her friend Mary Russell Mitford for the latest snippet—that Jane Eyre had been written by a governess from Cowan Bridge School: “I certainly don’t think that the qualities, half savage and & half freethinking, expressed in ‘Jane Eyre,’ are likely to suit a model governess,” the poet observed wryly. “Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip . . .) I couldn’t resist the temptation of communicating it. People are so curious . . . about this particular authorship.”

The signatures of Currer, Elllis, and Acton Bell. Via Wikimedia.

A similarly avid interest in Currer Bell’s identity was shown by Harriet Martineau, a novelist who had much in common with Char­lotte. Martineau, who came from an intellectually distinguished Uni­tarian family, had come to notice in the 1830s with her essays on social reform, Illustrations of Political Economy, and her bestselling novel, Deerbrook. Charlotte was an admirer of the novel and in tribute sent Martineau a copy of Shirley on publication. Little did she imagine how closely the accompanying note would be examined by its recipient for clues as to Currer Bell’s sex. “The hand was a cramped and nervous one,” Martineau recalled in her autobiography, “which might belong to any body who had written too much, or was in bad health, or who had been badly taught.” Martineau had noticed what might or might not have been a genuine slip of the pen when Currer Bell changed the pronoun “she” to “he” in his/her covering letter, but was convinced anyway, from some domestic details in Jane Eyre, that the author could only have been a woman. She therefore addressed her reply on the outside to “Currer Bell Esqre” but began it “Madam.”

There was no point struggling too long against this tide, especially when it brought with it very welcome messages such as the one that Smith, Elder forwarded in November from Elizabeth Gaskell, prais­ing Shirley in such generous and sympathetic terms that it brought tears to Charlotte’s eyes. “She said I was not to answer it—but I can­not help doing so,” Charlotte told Williams. “[S]he is a good—she is a great woman—proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell’s nature—it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my Sister Emily—in Miss Martineau’s mind I have always felt the same—though there are wide differences—Both these ladies are above me—certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience—I think I could look up to them if I knew them.” In her reply to Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell used the female pronoun with­out demur.

Eagerness to know such people began to work on Charlotte in a beneficial way. She came to realise, gradually and imperfectly, the effect that her presence on the literary scene had been having ever since the publication of Jane Eyre—its effect on readers, writers and the culture generated between them. That world had its own life and momentum and would go on without her whether she joined it or not, though she began to think it time to assert herself. Just before she fell out with him over his disappointing review of Shirley, Charlotte had confessed to George Henry Lewes that during the previous year she had sometimes ceased “to care about literature and critics and fame” altogether, that she had temporarily “lost sight of whatever was promi­nent in my thoughts at the first publication of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” “[B]ut now I want these things to come back—vividly—if possible.” Something else was also impelling her to find new distractions—the anniversary of Emily’s death looming, memories of which were revived with intol­erable poignancy by the returning season. By the middle of November, she told Williams that she had “almost formed the resolution of coming to London,” and then—nearly as abruptly as her trip to London with Anne in 1848—she was packing her bags and heading for a fort­night’s stay with George Smith and his family in the “big Babylon.”

* * *

Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar.

Smith was keen to treat his guest to some stimulating outings: Charlotte saw Macready, the most famous actor of the day, both in Macbeth and in Othello (though she shocked a dinner party by being insufficiently impressed with him) and went to the National Gallery, where she was delighted with an exhibition of some of the paintings that Turner had bequeathed to the nation. Smith had a whole list of people he wished Charlotte to meet: Lady Morgan (author of The Wild Irish Girl), Catherine Gore (one of the fashion­able “silver-fork” novelists), Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens. As it was, he tested Miss Brontë’s sociability to a new extreme by inviting two gentlemen to dinner one evening: Dr. John Forbes, with whom Charlotte had been in correspondence during Anne’s last illness, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Smith had forewarned the novelist not to upset Miss Brontë by indicating that he knew she was Currer Bell, but Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar, quoting from Jane Eyre, when the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after dinner. Charlotte was discomposed (not surprisingly, since Rochester’s cigar habit was one of Constantin Heger’s bequests to her novel) and shut down the conversation “in a chilly fashion,” as Smith was sorry to see, but Thackeray apparently went off to his club none the worse for his reprimand, saying, “Boys! I have been dining with ‘Jane Eyre.’ ”

For all its interest, Charlotte found the evening very taxing, and knew that nerves had made her “painfully stupid” with the man whose works she so admired. She fared much better with an introduction she arranged herself, writing to Harriet Martineau as Currer Bell to ask if she could call. Martineau and her relations waited in suspense to see who would turn up at the appointed hour: “whether a tall moustached man six feet high or an aged female, or a girl, or—altogether a ghost, a hoax or a swindler!” Miss Martineau needed the aid of an ear trumpet, so was hoping that the visitor’s real name was properly announced; she told her cousins they were to shout it distinctly into the horn if not. When a carriage was heard at the door and the bell rung, “in came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair.” Charlotte did reveal her real name, but the Mar­tineaus were sworn to keep it secret, and Charlotte must have been pleased with them and with the frisson her dramatic arrival caused, for she relaxed and was able to talk to them very naturally.

*

If Smith had hoped that this injection of activity and interest into Miss Brontë’s life would bring her out of her shell, he was wrong—she was and remained very self-conscious in company—but the closer contacts she made, with Elizabeth Gaskell particularly, fed her craving for intelligent discussion and a sympa­thetic audience.

Charlotte may have been encouraged by Elizabeth Gaskell’s inter­est in her life, and her deeply sympathetic response to the story of her siblings’ deaths from consumption (which Gaskell, incidentally, immediately assumed the emaciated Miss Brontë had also contracted), to consider doing what she had previously refused, and write something biographical about them. The adverse criticism that the works of Ellis and Acton Bell had attracted and the fading of interest in them since their deaths—which the public didn’t know about, of course—hung on Charlotte’s conscience. While she was fêted and rewarded, while she visited celebrities and banked large cheques from her publisher (£500 for the copyright of Shirley), her sisters were forgotten. Having asked George Smith to buy back the rights to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey from the recalcitrant Newby, Charlotte offered to write a biographical preface to a new edition, in line with what he and Wil­liams had suggested in 1849. In prose of sombre power and beauty, she outlined her family’s remote country upbringing, close sibling bonds and love of their moorland home, their delight in composition and—after Charlotte’s chance discovery of Emily’s poems—their efforts to get the poems, and then their novels, published and read. It made an irresistible narrative.

[Their works] appeared at last. Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunder­stood; the identity of its author was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre. Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now. Hence, I fear, arose a prejudice against the book.

Emily’s character comes strongly before the reader: proud, uncompro­mising, distant, stoical. Her death, and that of Anne, were told briefly, but from a depth of personal pain that made this one of the most moving memorials of the age, to two tragic young women whose real names were only just being revealed:

Never in all her life had [Emily] lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and awe. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.

“An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world,” Charlotte said, brilliantly fulfilling that role herself in this poignant tribute to doomed and unrecognised genius. Of Anne, whose person­ality was, as in life, eclipsed by the heroic Emily, Charlotte said, “[she was] long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent,” but that “a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.” As character studies, these could hardly have been more suggestive and intriguing. The mystery of “the Bells” was solved—the legend of “the Brontës” begun.

* * *

From the Book:
CHARLOTTE BRONTË by Claire Harman
Copyright © 2015 by Claire Harman
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

Clara Bingham | Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul | Random House | May 2016 | 30 minutes (8,161 words)

 
Below is an excerpt from Witness to the Revolution, an oral history of the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. In this excerpt, witnesses recall the month when everything seemed to fall apart. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

You can jail the revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution.

—FRED HAMPTON, SPEECH, 1969

*

December 1969 was plagued by violence and despair. As bloodshed in Vietnam escalated, so did violence at home. The ranks of Americans who considered themselves “revolutionaries” swelled to as many as a million, and militant resistance threatened nearly all government institutions related to the war effort. Nonviolent civil disobedience of just months earlier, with the October and November Moratoriums, had evolved into violent clashes with police, rioting, arson, and bombings. In the fifteen-month period between January 1969 and April 1970, an average of fifty politically motivated bombings occurred each day.

At the vanguard of this domestic rebellion was the Black Panther Party, which, in reaction to police brutality and FBI harassment, publicly declared war against the police. Two dozen Black Panther chapters had opened across the country, and in 1969 the police killed 27 Panthers and arrested or jailed 749. J. Edgar Hoover announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country,” and he assigned two thousand full-time FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” the Panthers and other New Left organizations. In a 1969 speech to Congress, Hoover declared that the New Left was a “firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government.”

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged on. From 1961 until 1971, the U.S. military dropped more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals— defoliants or herbicides, including Agent Orange—on 4.8 million Vietnamese. In 1969, 11,780 American troops were killed, bringing the death toll to 48,736. It was not a festive Christmas for those in the peace movement. John Lennon and Yoko Ono displayed huge billboards in Los Angeles, London, and other cities that read: “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” On New York City’s Fifth Avenue during the holiday shopping rush, a woman blocked the street with a sign that read, “How Many Shopping Days Until Peace?”

* * *

KARL ARMSTRONG
(student, University of Wisconsin–Madison)

I remember sitting in the student union with my brother Dwight and watching news accounts of the My Lai massacre, and I couldn’t believe our country had sunk to such low depths. Even before the My Lai story came out, I had come to the realization that we were basically fighting these peasant people in Vietnam, and it was a very asymmetric sort of war, using all of this technology and bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of people who were basically fighting back with limited resources.

At some point I felt like I became Viet Cong. My allegiance had switched. I thought, I would rather be with these people and lose, than be an American and win. And that’s when I realized that I was no longer an American. I was really a citizen of the world.

I was of the opinion that any kind of demonstration against the war was important, but I just didn’t feel it was going to go anywhere. The war could carry on, and the demonstrations would be ignored. They could do that for the next ten years and it’d be the same thing. I had no problem with the demonstrations, they were my brothers and sisters out there, but I realized that I was in a very special place, because I didn’t have a family of my own and I wasn’t tied up in corporate America. I didn’t have a job. I felt like I wasn’t risking anything. I was a free actor, and I had a responsibility. I decided I would remove all the obstacles in front of me in order to help bring this war to an end.

* * *

DECEMBER 4, CHICAGO: FRED HAMPTON

MARK RUDD (Weathermen leader)

When Fred Hampton was murdered on December 4, [1] it confirmed our whole strategy, which was that a war was taking place already, and we’d better get ready to respond to it.

BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weathermen leader)

Fred Hampton had talked to his friends and to his mom about being a lawyer. He had Bill Kunstler’s book by his bed. He was one of those absolutely charismatic, magnetic people. He was young, twenty-one, but had a great sense of people, and a theatrical ability to make gestures that were very powerful—for example, commandeering ice cream trucks in the summer for kids, and then getting arrested for it. Even in his high school days with the NAACP he did things like demand access to segregated swimming pools on the west side of Chicago.

By the time I knew him he was saying, “I’m high on the people. I’m high on freedom,” and he’d become the chairman of the Black Panther Party here in Chicago. We shared a printing press with the Panthers. They were down the block from us. We agreed about some things and disagreed about other things, but they knew us pretty well and we knew them pretty well. We had an intense relationship with the Panthers; we saw them all the time.

FRED HAMPTON (1969 speech)

A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panther Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals. . . . What we’re saying is that there are white people in the mother country that are for the same types of things that we are for stimulating revolution in the mother country. And we say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind. [2]

BERNARDINE DOHRN

I knew the National Lawyers Guild people and the People’s Law Office people very well, so on December 4, when Fred was murdered, they immediately took charge of the situation and seized the crib—as the apartment was called—door for evidence of bullet holes. We, the Panther Party survivors, and the People’s Law Office responded in a way that kind of reenacted the murder of Emmett Till—with a massive, public, visual look at what the police had done. And of course the police and the FBI—who we now know conspired to murder him—were both on the scene, and participants.

ERICKA HUGGINS (Black Panther Party member)

When Fred Hampton was murdered, I knew immediately, even though I was incarcerated at the time,[3] that Fred did not die just at the hands of the police officers that invaded his home. It was a setup, and later it was proven that it was set up—that he was drugged. He was killed in his sleep in the middle of the night by the police who arrived in borrowed Chicago Phone Company trucks. So it was orchestrated. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI for forty-seven years, created COINTELPRO as the counterintelligence program. You can read their mission online. I wish I was making it up; I wish it hadn’t occurred. But the fear that is at the root of racism will prompt people who have that fear to do very inhumane things.

Fred was an amazing human being. He was very dedicated to working with all communities. If you just listen to him and just watch him on video, you’ll see why J. Edgar Hoover wanted him dead.

FBI surveillance and harassment was something we were all used to. Our phones were tapped and we were followed all the time. They would leave notes on our car windows threatening us, “Hi John, hi Ericka. We’re watching you.” Every night when we would leave the party office in South Central, unmarked police cars would shine their floodlights on the windows and the doors of the office. This is how we left the office every night. We got used to it. I always remember that whole period in Los Angeles as living in a state of war. But we weren’t warring; something was warring against us.

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VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN (SDS organizer)

I was organizing high school kids. They were all white, living in Berwyn and Cicero—very right-wing white communities in the Chicago suburbs. I got to know Fred Hampton in Maywood, where he was head of the NAACP chapter, and I invited him to come and talk to the students. These kids’ parents were so racist; they’d never talked to a black person before. Fred would sit with them for a whole evening and talk to them. He was so warm and understanding and charismatic. They fell in love with him. He was just wonderful.

When he was killed, I took the students that I was working with to where his body lay in state in a Baptist church in Chicago. It was this incredible scene. The kids I worked with knew him before he was this big public figure. He was lying in state with a rifle by his side in the coffin, and beads, and the Black Panther Party newspaper. All these Black Panthers were standing guard around the coffin with their berets and their black leather jackets. I was with a group of white girls and we stood in line for hours, and then we finally went by his casket. I almost passed out in his casket because I’m Jewish and we don’t do viewings. But it was quite an experience having this gaggle of young teenage white girls going through a black church with all of these Panthers around, and they all loved Fred, so they were all crushed. [4]

CATHY WILKERSON (Weathermen member)

When Fred Hampton was killed it felt like the police were going to end democracy in the United States. It also felt like the warmongers, the “U.S. must rule the world” people, and anti-women and anti-black leadership of the country were going to win and solidify control. We were young. We were in a complete panic. It was pretty scary.

MARK RUDD

When the Panthers came along, and they were carrying guns and spouting “by any means necessary,” and the government reacted by taking them seriously, and murdering them, we said, “It’s war. And we’ve got to be out there, and not just applauding from the sidelines.” See, there’s always a tendency for white people to hold back and applaud from the sidelines, but we identified that as being racist, to not take any risks. We didn’t want to be liberals. To be a liberal was to be a hypocrite, and to be a betrayer. So part of our thinking was, Which side are you on? “Avenge Fred Hampton!” became our battle cry.

Black power then became an enormous challenge to white kids. Would we be good Germans? Would we be racist and ignore what’s happening? Or would we support the people who are fighting and taking the risks? That became the challenge for the Weathermen. Most young whites don’t understand the extent of the challenge that the black movement posed to the Weather Underground, and to the movement.

MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS leader)

The Panthers saw themselves as urban guerrillas. I mean, the whole carrying guns and taking them to the statehouse in Sacramento and taking on the police—they saw themselves as being in an almost fascist country. Huey Newton used to say, “If the pigs are going to act like Nazis, we’re not going to act like Jews.” Which, you know, for a Jew like me, made me feel a little strange. But I understood what he meant. If you didn’t have the Panthers on your side, then you were doing something wrong, because they were the black vanguard.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

It took seven more years to prove it in the court case Iberia Hampton v. Hanrahan, which the People’s Law Office represented. I always tell my law students Fed Supp. 600 is one of the most astonishing cases you’ll ever read, because the federal appellate court found that there was a conspiracy to murder Fred Hampton, and then an elaborate cover-up and the FBI and the Chicago Police Department had lied and withheld documents ordered by the court and had an informer present inside the Panthers who had given them a map of the apartment where Fred and his wife were sleeping. So it was a deliberate assassination. But we knew that; we assumed that from the beginning. [5]

JULIUS LESTER
(writer, photographer, civil rights activist)

It’s very interesting, the different reactions of whites and those of us who were in SNCC had to the murder of Fred Hampton. Our feeling at SNCC was that the rhetoric of the Panthers led to his death. The Panthers had this rhetoric of violence, and if it’s one thing that white America knows, it’s violence. You don’t challenge somebody on their strength. So you don’t get violent with white America, because they’re itching to kill you. Our feeling was that Fred Hampton did not have to die. That was the Panthers’ doing. So our response was very different than the response of SDS. The other deaths of the Panthers were senseless as far as we were concerned. You don’t challenge white policemen with guns; they’re eager to kill you. WESLEY BROWN (draft resister, Black Panther member) After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated, I realized that I had implicated myself in the kind of rhetoric that could bring about my own undoing. We [the Panthers] got revved up in a frenzy of rhetoric and began to believe our own bullshit about revolutionary change. Huey Newton [6] famously called it “revolutionary suicide.” And so I think all of us had to acknowledge that we were in some ways collaborating in a presentation of ourselves in a flamboyant way that would bring the very thing that we said is going to happen, to us. And then we were surprised when they believed what we said we were trying to do. I didn’t even know if I believed it. I had to examine if what I was doing had contributed to an ongoing struggle for people to better the circumstances of their lives, and where that becomes less the issue, and more about whether you are going to try to kill the police, or bring revolution to the streets.

To what end is it going to serve if I get up in the face of authorities where the pushback can be lethal? What does that achieve if confrontation and escalation of confrontation is the primary strategy to get attention for things that need to be paid attention to? So that’s what I had to ask myself.

FBI REPORT

December 6, 1969: Several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago, were bombed. No suspects have been developed in this matter and no organization claimed credit until almost five years later when the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] admitted that it was responsible in their book “Prairie Fire.” The WUO stated that they had perpetrated the explosion to protest the shooting deaths of Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969, by police officers.

* * *

DECEMBER 6, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: ALTAMONT

PETER COYOTE (Digger, communard)

The story of Altamont is that Sam Cutler, [7] the manager of the Rolling Stones, came to Peter Berg [8] and myself, because we were known for throwing these huge parties, where there was no violence, no trouble, no nothing. The reason there was no violence and no trouble was because we never made the concerts hierarchical—there was never one stage, there were multiple stages. If you throw a party for the summer solstice, everyone is equal under the sun, so what’s to fight about? You can be exactly who you want to be. You’re not taking anything away from anybody.

Peter and I both said the Rolling Stones are not an occasion for a party. There will be one stage, the Stones will own it, and everyone else will be the audience. That’s not the spirit of San Francisco. We’ll have a party, we’ll have six stages, and the Rolling Stones can have one of them. We’ll give everybody redwood trees to plant and yards of silk and this and that, and come up with a party. And Sam said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that for the Rolling Stones.”

We also knew by that time that the Rolling Stones were going to make a documentary, so it’s not a free concert. [9] The audience was going to be extras. So free doesn’t mean there’s no admission ticket. Free means the audience are co-creators of the event. You don’t need security. You only need security when there’s a treasured space that has to be kept clear of everybody else. So the idea of bringing in the Hells  Angels [10] was a terrible mistake. We said, wrong place, wrong time, there’s going to be trouble, and none of us went, and there was trouble.

GREIL MARCUS (Rolling Stone music critic)

I went to Altamont, December 6, with a couple of friends, but I went there as a Rolling Stone writer, to write about it. We drove to the Altamont Speedway in Northern California and got there with no problem. Somehow we missed all of these horrible traffic jams. We knew that the Hells Angels were going to be there providing security. You could tell from the minute you got there—it was quite early, nine in the morning—that the crowd was angry, unfriendly, and pushy. Nobody made room for you—and that was before the Hells Angels started beating people up.

There was this big Hispanic guy, probably six four, very fat, and he took off all his clothes and started dancing. This is right in front of the stage where I was sitting. And he was acting like, “Oh, we’re all free, and I’m dancing to the music, and I’m full of enthusiasm,” but people began to move away because he was trampling people. So the Hells Angels leaped out and started beating him, and they beat him to the ground, and kept beating him. The crowd just immediately clears this huge area. They finally drag him backstage and the crowd comes back like some gigantic insect colony. From that day on it was just ugly. And it was angry. And it was mean, and there were a lot of crazy fucked-up people there.

The Hells Angels killed Meredith Hunter [who was black], because he was right at the front of the stage with his white girlfriend, and they didn’t like that, and they jumped off the stage and started chasing him and beating him. He was stabbed before he pulled a gun out, but he did pull a gun.

MICHAEL RANDALL (Brotherhood of Eternal Love acid dealer)

I was at Altamont. I left before all that happened. You could’ve been there and not known it was going on. It was really huge, three hundred thousand people. I was there for the music, but I had a meeting that I had to go to and one hundred and twenty million doses of acid to sell all over America, so I was busy.

GREIL MARCUS

For all of us involved, we understood it as the end of something, as this overwhelmingly symbolic end of so much that we had believed in and invested ourselves in. And it just so happened that the Rolling Stones had put out an album at that time, Let It Bleed, and the album was about the end of the sixties. That was its explicit subject. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—what an ultimate anti-sixties thing to say. That song and “Gimme Shelter” were about the moral collapse of the counterculture, just to put it in a nutshell.

When they were playing “Gimme Shelter” at Altamont, which was in the middle of their set, I was pushed off the stage, and later I was on top of the VW van behind the stage when the van collapsed. I could tell that something terrible was happening, because you heard screaming, and you heard Keith Richards berating the Angels, and Mick Jagger pleading with them. I said, “The hell with it,” and I left. I started walking away in the dark to go back to my car. At one point I tripped, because it was pitch dark. I was lying on the ground and I could hear them playing “Gimme Shelter,” which at that point I’d heard on the record, and had been overwhelmed by. I heard them playing it and I thought I’d never heard anything sound as good as this sounds. It was so powerful.

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today

I went back to my car, where I found my radio had been stolen. People believed they were moral and high-minded. People believed that they had somehow escaped the endemic moral, political, and economic corruption of American society, and they found out that day that that wasn’t true.

JOHN HARTMANN (music agent, manager)

It was sort of like the funeral where they buried King Hippie. Altamont was a big damaging blow to the hippie peace and love ethic. This wasn’t peace and love, this was violence and death. The Stones’ image was as bad boys, not good boys like the Beatles. The Beatles, who started out dirty, became clean in the minds of the public. With the Stones, the whole thing was about the devil, and cross-dressing, and everything that was taboo, you could see manifested in various songs like “Sympathy for the Devil.” So they were the bad boys; they made a huge mistake, because they got the Hells Angels to be the security for Altamont.

GREIL MARCUS

It was probably the worst day of my life in a lot of ways. When it was over, we had a meeting at Rolling Stone among those of us who had been there, and we thought, this was so awful, that we shouldn’t even dignify it by covering it. Jann [Wenner] said, “No, we’re going to cover this from top to bottom. We’re going to use every resource we have and we’re going to lay the blame.” The whole issue was devoted to Altamont as this day of calamity, horror, and bad faith on the part of all different kinds of people.

* * *

MID-DECEMBER, NEW YORK, CHICAGO: SDS

MARK RUDD

I was one of the people who implemented the closing of the SDS New York regional office and the closing of the national office. That decision was made in conjunction with the decision to go underground. Now I consider the closing down of those SDS national and regional offices to be the largest single political error that I’ve ever made.

CATHY WILKERSON

I remember being at the SDS national office in Chicago when the cops were lined up outside. We called the University of Wisconsin, who kept an archive on SDS, and said, “Do you want the remaining papers?” And they came down at the drop of a hat with a van and literally shoveled the papers off the floor into the van, because the [SDS] office had been trashed by the cops.

MARK RUDD

I had a Volkswagen van, and I remember picking up the mailing addresses for the whole New York region; they were in a couple of big boxes. We had a loft on 131 Prince Street that somebody had given us, and Ornette Coleman was practicing the saxophone above us. I remember around the end of December picking up these mailing stencils and taking them with Ted Gold to the West Street Pier, at the end of Fourteenth Street, and dumping them into the garbage barge that was parked there. That was the end of SDS. If I had been an FBI agent, I couldn’t have done it better.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

We felt a lot of despair, and that’s always unhealthy—it’s a human feeling, obviously, but it’s also politically very unhealthy. We felt the holidays taking over—Christmas lights by Thanksgiving, and people going about their lives as if bombs weren’t raining on the Vietnamese—was unspeakable. And everything that captured the public mind—Nixon’s stupid stuff and ultimately the Charles Manson [11] murders—things that obsessed people were just sideshows and circuses. We had to find a way to bring people’s attention back to the crisis of our time, which in our mind was the Vietnamese struggle and the black freedom movement.

By the time of Flint, a lot had happened. The Days of Rage had happened. We had had lots of arrests, and lots of charges against us. The [Chicago Seven] conspiracy trial was ending, and SDS as such didn’t exist. There was still a campus movement around the country, and a huge antiwar movement, but there was also a growing military assault against Vietnam, and against Laos and Cambodia, and Fred Hampton had been assassinated. All of that was right before Flint.

* * *

DECEMBER 27, FLINT, MICHIGAN: NATIONAL WAR COUNCIL

MARK RUDD

The War Council meeting in Flint, Michigan, December 27–31, was kind of a strange hybrid, because on the one hand it was the continuation of an SDS tradition, which was bringing people together a few times a year for conferences and conventions. SDS typically had three of them. And this was the same kind of thing. But we called it the National War Council meeting and sent out pamphlets calling it a “wargasm.” And it was more like a rally. It also was crazy because it was obviously infiltrated by many, many undercover cops.

Flint was insanity. The venue was a dilapidated dance hall in the black neighborhood. There was a giant cardboard machine gun, and pictures of Che [Guevara] and Fred Hampton all over the walls, and orgiastic dancing to Sly and the Family Stone, but we made up our lyrics. “Che vive, viva Che! Che vive, viva Che.” Sly and the Family Stone were very cool. [12]

Stand
In the end you’ll still be you
One that’s done all the things you set out to do
Stand
There’s a cross for you to bear
Things to go through if you’re going anywhere
Stand
For the things you know are right
It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight
Stand
All the things you want are real
You have you to complete and there is no deal
Stand, stand, stand
Stand, stand, stand

TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)

The meeting in Flint was in late December, just a month and a half before the [Chicago Seven] trial ended. I went there and taught a karate class. But frankly, I thought it was spooky. I think people might’ve been on speed—it could be that simple. They were already in another world. The inner group had made a decision to go underground; they weren’t sharing it.

I was feeling very bourgeois. I was with my girlfriend, and some other couple, and a kid might’ve been with us. It was no place for couples. They had smashed monogamy, which was a way of giving yourself to the revolution. Monogamy was a form of possessive individualism to be abandoned.

If I had been footloose and not on trial, it might’ve been seen slightly different. If I hadn’t been in a relationship where there was a small child at stake, it might’ve been different. I think it’s more that I was older, and I had this residual foundation of the early sixties in my soul, which the Weathermen were dismissive of. My rock foundation was the early sixties. Theirs was the mid to late sixties. It doesn’t sound chronologically like it’s much distance in time, but it’s an eternity. If you were a college freshman in ’64 as opposed to a freshman in ’57, that’s an eternity. The only thing I can add, now that I look back on it, was that I was becoming out of touch. I mean, these people were having flat-out naked, wild orgies as a political act.

MARK RUDD

I’ve always respected and adored Tom Hayden, and I was really very, very pleased that he came to Flint. You have to understand that from 1962 to 1969, SDS leadership had gone through three generations in seven years. I’d be of the last generation, and Tom being of the first. I think he was the only person there from that first generation.

Tom Hayden has a very clear view of it. He says in one of his essays, as the violence escalated in Vietnam, the violence at home escalated in response. That’s it, that’s a simple way to look at it, and I agree with him.

My FBI files report has me saying at Flint, “We are going to meet and map plans to avenge the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” My own madness slipped out of my mouth when I said, “It’s a wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.”

BILL AYERS (blog, March 3, 2008)

Bernardine was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!” I didn’t hear that exactly, but words that were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, a murder we were certain—although we didn’t know it yet—was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of an emerging police state. She linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing terror in Vietnam. “This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and our response. And what do we find in our newspapers? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it! . . .” So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke, stupid perhaps, tasteless, but a joke nonetheless—and Hunter Thompson for one, was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor.

ROBIN MORGAN (radical feminist)

When I was noticeably pregnant with Blake, I ran into Bernardine. This was right around the time when she made the pronouncement about Sharon Tate—that the Manson people stuck a fork in her belly after they killed her, adding, “Wasn’t that cool?” I was pregnant and she said, “Is that a pig child?” And I said, “You mean is the father white?” Because if the father was black then the child was acceptable. “As a matter of fact, as it turns out the father is white,” I said. And she said, “So why are you having it?” I said, “What would you have me do, abort a planned, wanted child? Or perhaps I should just stick it in a trash can when it’s born.” She said, “Now, that would be a good idea.” So, frankly, I have never quite forgiven Bernardine, despite her claims of having revised her virulent anti-feminist politics.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

I feel self-critical about those days. I think that that’s the period of time when I feel like the metaphor of bringing the war home took over my language, and the way that I thought about the movement. I can understand that, because I feel like we had this fierce sense that somebody had to stand up and object to the war, and the bullets were flying. People were dying in the thousands every week in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and were being assassinated at home. So that part I can understand, but obviously I feel now that the language of war, even revolutionary war, made us harsh, made me harsh; and made me speak about war without doing everything to avoid it without recognizing the horror and the harm; and how it turns people, even people who are fighting for freedom, into something else. So I think that period was harsh.

I have vivid memories of that December: the horror of people going shopping, and Christmas bells. You know how in an election cycle like this you can get really cynical about the American people. We can’t talk about the world? We can’t be part of the world? We can’t talk about the environment? That was the feeling times a thousand, because of having the images of war on TV, and having the vets coming home, and knowing from the Vietnamese what the cost was on the ground.

The iconic antiwar propaganda And Babies uses a photograph of the My Lai Massacre. It was created December 26, 1969.

MARK RUDD

The decision was made at Flint that I would step out of the Weather Bureau. I was suffering enormous self-doubt. I didn’t question the rightness of our strategy or of our method, but I questioned my ability to do it. I knew I was posing and it didn’t feel right, and so I experienced this as depression. The other members of the Weather Bureau, which was the leadership of the Weatherman faction of SDS, could see that I was flagging, I was wavering. So, by mutual agreement, we agreed I would demote myself out of the top leadership, down into what you might call a regional leadership position.

Also one of the craziest things that happened was after Flint, I went to Ann Arbor and shacked up with a girlfriend of mine, and we both did acid for the first time. You can imagine what that was like—total paranoia, plus the feelings of exhilaration around psychedelics. I took my first acid trip on December 31, 1969, and took my last acid trip on December 31, 1970, and in between I became a fugitive.

I spent the month of January traveling around the country, trying to recruit people in the organization to go underground. By the time that I got to New York in February, I was still aboveground, and I was still using my own ID. I still had contact with my parents and old friends, and was using regular telephones. But we set up a series of houses in Manhattan that were completely clandestine. We rented apartments under clandestine names and we began living there and operating. And that included an armed robbery to finance the operation.

There were circles of support. And it involved some people being willing and able to go underground and other people wanting to help. It’s not as if there was a clear line between those in the organization and those outside the organization.There were sort of circles of agreement and of support. And I suspect that lawyers felt maybe that they should have been on the front lines but their skill kept them doing legal stuff. We were getting money from wherever we could get money. It wouldn’t matter. We’d get it from our parents; we’d get it from anybody who had money.

TOM HAYDEN

As my day job, I was working inside the system, which the Weathermen considered wrong, and they thought I should go underground with them. I wouldn’t do that because I didn’t feel that I fit in with them. However, I didn’t know if they were right or wrong. This is what was so existential about it. Maybe a police state was coming. Certainly towards the Panthers it seemed to be coming. The Berrigan brothers had gone underground. There were different undergrounds. There was a Catholic underground against the draft. There were Panther undergrounds. There were draft resistance undergrounds. Drug dealer undergrounds, marijuana undergrounds. All across America, a lot of people were breaking one law or another. So it wasn’t a completely strange idea.

So in that sense, I took seriously the Weathermen analysis of repression and I thought it was legitimate, but I wasn’t going to do it. I knew all sides of the debate but I wasn’t leaving my legal defense work in the court [at the Chicago Seven trial]. And I wasn’t giving up on the idea of persuading public opinion, or persuading an appellate judge. It could be that I was trained all my life to use words, and to abandon words for guns just didn’t seem the best use of my talents.

BRIAN FLANAGAN

In December of ’69 we started dumping the collectives, and starting other collectives that were doing violent stuff. The mass collectives that were living openly in apartments we dumped and started going into safe houses and doing arson and various low-level bombings. All of the big names went underground.

* * *

DECEMBER 27, MADISON, WISCONSIN: CHRISTMAS BOMBINGS

KARL ARMSTRONG

It was winter break, so there was no one on campus. I felt like I was out there in the emotional wilderness. I had reached an emotional low point, where I said, “I really have to act.” The armory was half a block away from where I was living, and half of the building was devoted to ROTC. There had been lots of demonstrations at the armory. First of all, I thought it was a beautiful building. I played basketball there. But I realized what it meant symbolically. I was of very mixed mind about it. It went against my grain to destroy property, but I knew that the symbolism was really important.

On December 27, 1969, at two o’clock in the morning, I walked up to the building, threw a jar of gasoline in, and burned the building. Basically it was my declaration of war. I was now at war with the United States. To me it was laughable: It felt like puny acts against the war machine. But it was important, because this was a way of committing myself. After the first act I said, “There’s no turning back.” It was just a matter of marshaling resources, picking the right targets, and trying to be smart. I truly felt out there, and yet, in another sense, I felt really comfortable because I was finally active.

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL,
DECEMBER 29, 1969 (front page)

FIREBOMBS DAMAGE UW
ROTC BUILDING

Firebombs were thrown through three windows of the ROTC building at Linden and Babcock Dr. on the University of Wisconsin campus early Sunday, damaging several desks and scorching the ceiling of a lecture hall.

No one was injured.

KARL ARMSTRONG

After the firebombing of the armory, I talked to my brother Dwight and I said, “I’d like to do an aerial bombing of the Badger ordnance plant.”* And he said, “Are you crazy? What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, remember the firebombing of the ROTC building a couple of nights ago? That was me.” I said I thought a bombing of the Badger ordnance plant on New Year’s Eve would be the perfect symbolic bombing against the war. The Badger ordnance plant was producing the bulk of the rocket powder used in Vietnam. It was a huge plant. I picked New Year’s Eve for the symbolic starting the New Year. I thought that symbolically it was the time to do it.

My brother had been a gas jockey at the airport, so he did the flying. We went to Morey Airport and we pulled an ROTC training plane out of the hangar. Dwight wasn’t a certified pilot, and he had never flown at night before. Lynn, my girlfriend, Dwight, and I loaded up a big metal ashtray from the fraternity house and a couple of mayonnaise bottles filled with ammonium nitrate. I knew about bombs from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But we didn’t have a detonator. So I knew they probably wouldn’t go off. The symbolic act seemed more important than the actual damage, [13] because if the bombs did go off, we’d probably have been blown out of the air. We followed the road up to the Badger ordnance plant, and we could see Lynn from the air as she was going in to make the phone call to warn them at the plant that we were going to bomb it in protest of the Vietnam War. I didn’t think anyone would be working there because it was New Year’s Eve.

We flew over in a snowstorm and I dropped one of the bombs out. I told my brother, “I don’t think I hit anything except snow. You have to go a lot lower.” And he said, “If we go any lower, and that bomb goes off, we are dead ducks.” And I said, “You’re going to have to go lower if we’re going to hit anything.” So we made another pass, and by that point I was thinking, Well, it’s just symbolic anyway. And I just dumped the bombs out of the door as we flew over the fuel tanks.

We landed at the airport outside of Prairie du Sac, left the plane in the middle of the runway, and ran to the car with Lynn to go back to Madison. When we got back to Madison, I thought, Maybe we should call the newspapers and tell them what we did. So I called the State Journal and I said, “I just firebombed the Badger ordnance plant.” And the guy says something like, “Yeah, yeah. And what’s your name, please?” And I said, “No, we firebombed the Badger ordnance plant from the air.” Then I remember calling The Daily Cardinal and I believe the Kaleidoscope, the two student newspapers, and told them the bombing was because of the Vietnam War. Basically I wanted to lock into people’s minds that we were acting like Nazi Germany. That this aerial bomb was symbolic of the Allies’ bombing of munitions plants in Germany. It was my way of bringing the war home, so people would be able to see it in a different light.

BILL DYSON (FBI agent)

These leads start coming in and the supposition then was “This guy must have been a Vietnam pilot, because he landed with the wind!” I mean, there’s a snowstorm, he comes in, and he lands the wrong way. And it was like, “Oh my God, this guy stole the plane, and he was actually able to land it? He must be really a tremendous pilot!” And hell, the guy didn’t have a license, and it was miraculous that he was able to land the plane that way. They dropped the fuel. I don’t know where the bombs went. They had no detonator. Maybe it was the Weathermen, we didn’t know. [14]

STEVE REINER (editor of The Daily Cardinal)

After the Christmas bombings by what we would later call the “New Year’s Gang,” there was a debate at the Cardinal about the difference between property damage and personal damage. I think the fact that no one was hurt and that these episodes all seemed to be calculated to destroy property, but not to harm people, helped us rationalize it. We made a distinction between political sabotage and terrorism. I think it was obvious that these guys never intended to hurt anybody. We rationalized it because the levels of frustration, anger, and exasperation that were welling up in all of us had reached a crescendo. We rationalized it because no one was hurt.

This is what I wrote in an editorial: “And if acts such as those committed in the last few days are needed to strike fear into the bodies of once fearless men and rid this campus once and for all of repressive and deadly ideas and institutions, then so be it.” It was the line “then so be it” that I regret writing now. I don’t really regret anything else in the editorial. I think saying that that kind of manifestation is inevitable is absolutely correct. And I think it was. It’s easy to say that it’s inevitable after it happens. But it was inevitable.

* * *

From the book WITNESS TO THE REVOLUTION by Clara Bingham.
Copyright © 2016 by Clara Bingham.
Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

* * *

^{[1] In one of the most brazen examples of police violence and FBI dirty tricks, Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was gunned down in his sleep at 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, by the Chicago police. Mark Clark, another Panther leader, was also killed in the raid. Though the police claimed they acted in self-defense, they were proven wrong by evidence showing ninety gunshots going one way through the front door of Fred Hampton’s apartment, where he slept with his fiancée, who was eight months pregnant. Hampton was killed by two bullets fired to his head at point-blank range in a cold-blooded assassination. The FBI assisted the Chicago police by giving them a map of the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment that they obtained from William O’Neal, an FBI informant who was Hampton’s trusted bodyguard. O’Neal had slipped a sleeping pill into Hampton’s drink when they had dinner together that night, sedating him so that he could not defend himself. ↩}

^{[2] J. Edgar Hoover was particularly threatened by Hampton because he preached racial solidarity against an oppressive U.S. government. He appealed to white as well as black radicals and moderates and had a charisma and way with words that enabled him to unite a fractured movement. One of the FBI’s COINTELPRO objectives was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” In 1967 the FBI opened a file on Fred Hampton that would eventually fill twelve volumes and more than four thousand pages. ↩}

^{[3] Ericka Huggins, along with Bobby Seale (cofounder of the Black Panther Party), was in jail awaiting trial on murder charges that were part of the New Haven Nine conspiracy trial. ↩}

^{[4] Five thousand people attended Fred Hampton’s funeral.↩}

^{[5] The police officers were found not guilty in a 1972 trial, but after thirteen years of litigating the civil rights case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were awarded $1.8 million—the largest settlement of its kind at the time. In 1990, FBI informant William O’Neal, who was Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, died in what some believe was a suicide. ↩}

^{[6] Huey Newton, who with Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, wrote an autobiography titled Revolutionary Suicide, which was published in 1973. ↩}

^{[7] After Altamont, Sam Cutler left the Rolling Stones and began working as the Grateful Dead’s tour manager. ↩}

^{[8] Peter Berg, Peter Coyote, and Emmett Grogan cofounded the San Francisco improv and radical community action group called the Diggers. They were fixtures in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in the mid-to late sixties. ↩}

^{[9]  Albert and David Maysles made a documentary, Gimme Shelter, about the last weeks of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, which ended with the Altamont Free Concert in Northern California. ↩}

^{[10] The Hells Angels were a motorcycle gang with a violent, outlaw history who rode Harley-Davidsons and were affiliated with parts of the counterculture, and were sometimes used to provide security. ↩}

^{[11] Charles Manson, a mentally disturbed musician who created a small cult called the Manson Family, was responsible for nine grisly murders committed in Los Angeles in July and early August of 1969, the most famous one being Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski. Manson and his accomplices were indicted for the Tate and other murders in December 1969. The high-profile trial began in Los Angeles in June 1970. ↩}

^{[12] Sly and the Family Stone, who played at Woodstock, was a racially integrated soul/funk band that created an original blend of the black Motown and San Francisco white psychedelic sound. The band released the album Stand! in May 1969; it sold three million copies and is considered one of the most successful albums of the sixties. The single “Stand!” reached number three on the charts in 1969. “Sly was less interested in crossing racial musical lines than in tearing them up,” wrote Greil Marcus in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 65. ↩}

^{[13] The Badger Army Ammunition Plant, or Badger Ordnance Works, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, made ammunition during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. During World War II it was the largest munitions factory in the world. ↩}

^{[14] Armstrong and the New Year’s Gang didn’t know the Weathermen and were acting independently, but according to FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, Bill Ayers sent a cell of Weathermen to Madison to try to make contact with the New Year’s Gang and scout out more locations in Madison to bomb in February 1970, but the plan was scrapped after events that occurred on March 6. See Larry Grathwohl, Bringing Down America (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 159. ↩}

Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship, has become our new Secretary of State. I took a deep dive into the archives, and, like all the amateur Kremlinologists and power-hungry oilmen who’ve tread this ground before me, I’ve learned that the deeper you drill, the bigger the risk. Stop somewhere around point #10 if you start to feel like you’re on shaky ground, or like you’re one nesting matryoshka doll short of a shell company.

* * *

1. In the summer of 2015, The Union of Concerned Scientists published a series of reports on what are known as The Climate Deception Dossiers—internal fossil fuel industry memos which reveal that “for nearly three decades, many of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to deceive the public about the realities and risks of climate change.”

2. In late 2015, InsideClimate News published a multi-part investigation of Exxon’s role in the cover-up. The series “describes how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.”

(I’d like to note: you could stop reading this post right now, and with the links I’ve just provided, you could already spend your entire day reading about a conspiracy.)

3. In summer 2016, Rolling Stone described ExxonMobil’s efforts to discredit these two reports in the face of numerous (still ongoing) efforts by environmental advocacy groups and state attorneys general to sue Exxon for fraud.

4. Part of this effort involved accusing the Rockefeller family of a “climate conspiracy,” since they had funded some of the investigations.

5. Tillerson refused to acknowledge the Exxon climate change cover-up during his Senate confirmation hearing.

6. He also refused to acknowledge Russia’s history of human rights abuses….

7. …and he denied that Exxon had lobbied against the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russia, which was a lie told under oath. As the New York Times reported way back in 2014:

Mr. Tillerson, Exxon’s chief executive, told reporters last week in Dallas that the company was making its skepticism about sanctions clear to the United States government. “Our views are being heard at the highest levels,” he said.

In fact, Exxon lobbied against sanctions as recently as December 2016.

8. Exxon had good reason to want the sanctions lifted. Again per the New York Times, in 2014, even as the U.S. was imposing sanctions on Russia for its aggression in Ukraine, Exxon signed an agreement with the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft to expand its drilling ventures in the Arctic and Siberia. This was not unusual—many oil companies continued making agreements with Russia, just in case sanctions were lifted.

There are so many things bigger than a dumpster left to set on fire.

9. However, Tillerson had by this time developed a notably cozy relationship with Russia. The New York Times reports:

…as Mr. Putin consolidated his control over Russia’s oligarchs, Mr. Tillerson underwent a profound change of outlook. He came to realize that the key to success in Russia, a country deeply important to Exxon’s future, lay in establishing personal relationships with Mr. Putin and his friend and confidant, Igor Sechin, the powerful head of Rosneft, the state oil company.

10. Tillerson’s relationship with Igor Sechin is apparently quite personal: “Sechin told a Reuters reporter that the sanctions hurt him in a personal way; he would no longer be able to come to the United States to take motorcycle rides with Tillerson.” Why does this matter? Well, there’s the not insignificant point that Sechin is, to editorialize briefly, a Keyser Söze-esque mythical crime lord. Per the Guardian in 2012:

For much of his career Igor Sechin – a former Soviet spy and close ally of Vladimir Putin – has been a man in the shadows. During Putin’s first presidential stint, the joke doing the rounds in Moscow was that Sechin didn’t actually exist: instead, U.S. diplomats mischievously suggested, he was a sort of urban myth, a bogeyman invented by the Kremlin to instill fear.

11. After emerging from the shadows, Sechin (who, by the way, is also no fan of climate change science) became Putin’s de facto second in command, and in fact Tillerson’s rising star may have been the only thing to stop the setting of Sechin’s. To quote at length a Russian commentator writing for the New York Times:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Sechin aligned himself with Mr. Putin, another former K.G.B. officer, as he began consolidating power in post-Soviet politics. Everywhere Mr. Putin went, Mr. Sechin was by his side as a trusted aide and adviser.

… The arrest last month of Aleksei Ulyukayev, the minister of economic development, on charges of bribery was widely viewed as an act of revenge by Mr. Sechin. With the arrest, the first of an active government minister in post-Soviet Russia, he again confirmed his image as the most sinister man in the president’s inner circle.

Earlier this year, Mr. Sechin’s expansion was so aggressive that it seemed plausible that Mr. Putin himself would get tired of him, and would try to rid himself of such an odious comrade in arms.

Now Mr. Sechin has nothing to fear. A gift has arrived from across the ocean. This man [Tillerson], whose international experience up to this point has been limited to his friendship with Hugo Chávez, the deceased president of Venezuela, has an exclusive international trump card that even Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov lacks.

Mr. Sechin’s friend will head GosDep [the US State Department], against which Mr. Putin’s entire domestic policy has been directed. It’s a stunning boon for the Kremlin and a crushing blow to everyone in Russia who has counted on the State Department to maintain anti-Putin positions, however restrained they might be.

Indeed, not only has Sechin avoided a possible fall, but his influence has reached new heights, or so the Economist reports:

“HELLO, you’ve called Rosneft,” goes a joke making the rounds in Moscow. “If you have an oil asset and you don’t plan to sell, press the hash key.” The Russian word for hash key, reshetka, also means “bars”, as in jail—where those who cross Rosneft’s head, Igor Sechin, tend to land.

12. That joke is a reference to the fact that on 7 December 2016, Rosneft sold off 19.5% of its shares, “one of [Russia’s] biggest privatizations since the 1990s.” Reuters reports that it “isn’t possible to determine from public records the full identities of those who bought it.”

Like many large deals, the Rosneft privatization uses a structure of shell companies owning shell companies, commonly referred to in Russia as a “matryoshka”, after the wooden nesting dolls that open to reveal a smaller doll inside.

Following the trail of ownership leads to a Glencore UK subsidiary and a company that shares addresses with the Qatari Investment Authority, but also to a firm registered in the Cayman Islands, which does not require companies to record publicly who owns them.

Moreover,

Two sources in the Russian government said the deal was also a surprise there: it had been agreed between Sechin and Putin’s Kremlin, above the cabinet. “Sechin did it all on his own – the government did not take part in this,” one of the sources said.

13. In light of this unusual sale, observers have pointed out that in the Steele Dossier, which has not been verified, and which began circulating in October 2016, it was alleged that, as Business Insider reports,

Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia’s state oil company, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia.

The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. The claim was sourced to “a trusted compatriot and close associate” of Sechin, according to the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele.

“Sechin’s associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft,” the dossier said. “In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”

There is some confusion about whether Page was even in Moscow on the alleged date, whether he was really ever working for the Trump campaign, and whether he wasn’t just bluffing. As Politico reported in September, when Page was first being investigated:

You are engaged in onanism,” said Leontiev, the spokesman for Rosneft and Sechin when I asked him if Page had met with Sechin. “It’s bullshit. Just bullshit. You need to understand who Sechin is to even ask this question. It’s hard to have a meeting with him at all. It’s absurd.”

However, it is worth noting two things.

First, in September, U.S. intelligence officials investigated Carter Page not only for meeting with Sechin but also, on the same trip, meeting with Igor Diveykin, whom U.S. intelligence officials believed was coordinating interference in the US elections. Yahoo News reported:

A former Russian security official, Diveykin now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election, the Western intelligence source said.

Carter Page returned to Russia in December, and by January he was known to be under investigation by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, ODNI, and FinCEN.

Second, over the past several weeks, there have been several arrests and one mysterious death in Russian intelligence circles, and Russian media (for what that’s worth) suggests that the arrests were linked to leaks—possibly leaks to Christopher Steele. Which could mean that the dead man, Oleg Erovinkin, is also linked to Christopher Steele. He could very well be the “trusted compatriot and close associate” of Sechin’s cited in the Steele Dossier. Quartz reports:

Which leads to the Dec. 26 death of a former KGB general named Oleg Erovinkin. An initial news account at the Russian website Life.ru said Erovinkin had been killed, shot twice in the head. That version quickly morphed into vaguer accounts of a death-under-investigation.

But the larger interesting fact related to Erovinkin’s death was that Steele’s memo cites a a source close to Igor Sechin, the Putin intimate and chairman of Rosneft. And Erovinkin—a long-time senior aide to Sechin—must be that source, a number of the news accounts speculate. Thus, according to these news accounts, there is a link between the Steele memo and Erovinkin’s death.

14. And, having not much further to go down that particular rabbit hole, I’ll direct your attention back to two entirely verifiable facts about Rex Tillerson’s new gig: the Trump administration drastically thinned the ranks of the State Department’s senior staff before Tillerson even had a chance to take over, and the entire Foreign Service is in an uproar over the Muslim ban.

So now you’re up to speed. Congratulations on having made it this deep. As we said in a simpler time, Drill, baby, drill.

At the one-month mark, we now have a working theory of what makes an employee fireable (or not even hireable) in the Trump administration. There are two main types.

Fireable Offense Type #1: Be Drop Dead Scandalous

1. In December, Jason Miller, who was tapped to be the White House communications director, quit after another transition official, A.J. Delgado, tweeted her jilted love at him. Miller and his wife were expecting a new baby, so, via Twitter, “Delgado congratulated ‘the baby-daddy’ on his promotion,” ominously adding: “The 2016 version of John Edwards.”

“When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it’s a bit … spooky,” Delgado then wrote. When an old law school friend asked on Twitter to whom she was referring, Delgado replied: “Jason Miller. Who needed to resign … yesterday.”

Delgado then deleted her Twitter account and, after Politico reported on the rumored affair, privately disclosed the details of the relationship to the transition team.

If you reach back into the deep part of yourself where you catalog other people’s misbehavior, you may even recall that Page Six reported back in October that, the night before the last presidential debate, Delgado and Miller, along with several journalists, were spotted together at the world’s largest strip club.

2. In January, Monica Crowley similarly backed out of her appointment to the National Security Council after CNN revealed she had plagiarized extensively in a book she published with HarperCollins. Politico followed up with a report that she had plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation. She had been accused of plagiarism before, by the Wall Street Journal. Crowley never admitted any wrongdoing. Here’s an example of a passage that popped fully formed into her head years after it popped into someone else’s, varying by a mere 18 words:

“[…] the benefits and prospects of success against the likely and actual costs and then reaches a determination as to whether the likely outcome is worth the sacrifice. As new events occur or objective conditions change, they are interpreted by political leaders and experts, and the ends and means are reevaluated. Traditionally, U.S. military operations have been explained and justified both in normative terms (stressing the importance of the principles and interests at stake) and pragmatic terms (stressing the good prospects and reasonable costs of the involvement.) Further, a focus on the particular objectives of the operation and the perceptions of the principles and interests that are involved establishes a connection between the objectives of the operation and the larger purpose behind it.”

3. In early February, Vincent Viola, the nominee for Army Secretary, withdrew because of insurmountable conflicts of interest. The Wall Street billionaire was making an effort to untangle himself from his many business ties, but, as the New York Times put it, “if his nomination had continued, he would have faced certain scrutiny for potentially becoming a government official who benefits from federal contracts.” Of course, there’s also the fact that it had just been revealed that, last August, Viola was “accused of punching a concessions worker at a racehorse auction.”

“Mr. Viola loves his wife and regrets the incident,” the spokesman said in a written statement in response to several questions.

4. Michael Flynn resigned from his post as head of the National Security Council after it turned out he had lied to Mike Pence about discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian ambassador, thereby exposing himself to potential Russian blackmail—plus, every time someone lies to Mike Pence, a fairy’s light goes out forever and an angel loses its wings.

Later it was revealed Flynn had also lied to the FBI.

5. Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder, withdrew his nomination after Oprah gave the Senate a VHS tape of his ex-wife Lisa Fierstein appearing in disguise on Oprah’s show for an episode called “High Class Battered Women.”

“Most men who are in positions like that don’t leave marks,” Fierstein said. “The damage that I sustained you can’t see. It’s permanent. … They don’t hit you in the face. They’re too smart. They don’t hit you in front of everyone.”

Puzder had also, like the high class man he is, employed an undocumented immigrant in his home.

6. Last week, six staffers were booted out of the White House after they failed FBI background checks. Trump’s director of scheduling, Caroline Wiles, resigned before the background check was completed, while several others were walked out by security. “The intensive background check… includes questions on the applicant’s credit score, substance use and other personal subjects.”

7. And, not that he’s part of the administration or anything, but the president did threaten to cut funding to UC Berkeley in his honor, so let’s throw it out there anyway: the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) threw internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos under the bus after video resurfaced in which he defended pedophilia. The next day he resigned from Breitbart News.

There are two takeaways here. The first is how low the low bar has dropped. So many things that used to be scandals—being racist, being absurdly unqualified, just actually hating the agency you’re in charge of—aren’t scandalizing anymore, at least not for Republicans. Steve Bannon provided a media platform for white supremacists. Jeff Sessions is pretty darn racist. Betsy DeVos hovers somewhere between not knowing what an IEP is (cue the public school teachers rolling their eyes) and thinking it’s great when voucher schools make kids sign away their federally guaranteed right to one. Poor Ben Carson. Rex Tillerson was literally just now the CEO of ExxonMobil, a corporate name synonymous with “sinister.” Scott Pruitt hates all life on planet earth more than you hate Donald Trump. And, if you strain your memory way back to Day Zero, you’ll recall that even the appointment of James “Pretty Reasonable Guy” Mattis (as I’ve taken to calling him, since it’s become apparent that “Mad Dog” is the new normal) was a disquieting breach of the important American tradition of civilian oversight of our military.

The second takeaway is that Donald Trump is made of Teflon. He has been accused, at various points, of each of the scandals mentioned above, and yet nothing has stuck to him. Melania plagiarized Michelle at the RNC; Trump has massive, almost incalculable conflicts of interest; Trump lied to Mike Pence about the same thing Flynn did (another angel gone); Trump has also been accused of sexual assault and wife battery; Trump hired undocumented workers; Trump has even been accused of pedophilia; and it probably goes without saying at this point, but Trump definitely would not pass an FBI background check. His credit score alone would kill him. He’s so uncreditworthy that no major banks will lend to him (except for Deutsche Bank with its shadowy Russian—there’s that word again, “Russian,” it just keeps coming up!—money laundering). To quote a great man, SICK!

The only good news is that at least Trump’s immunity does not seem to extend to anyone in his orbit. Which would make you think he must be scouting for less scandalous replacements for all these fallen Trumpists—a canny assumption after he replaced conspiracy theorist Flynn with upstanding citizen H. R. McMaster and domestic abuser Puzder with really quite normal Republican guy Alexander Acosta. (Well, normal except for one little thing, which is, and really you can’t make this stuff up, that Acosta was the federal prosecutor who gave convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart plea deal—that is, the same convicted pedophile in whose company Trump himself has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl.)

But, if you think that, you are ignoring one crucial factor, and that is:

Fireable Offense Type #2: Not Having Always Wanted Donald Trump to Be President (or Kind of Hating It Now)

You see, when it comes to hiring less scandalous people, the catch is that it’s hard to find people who aren’t a little bit—what’s a nice word for this? “eccentric”?—who have also never, at any point, publicly voiced the opinion that maybe Donald Trump wasn’t the best candidate for President of the United States of America. But those people—true believers—are the only people Trump wants! Loyal people! The best people!

This has caused some problems!

Not only are the true believers perhaps a bit more scandal-prone than the average American (my survey above seems to imply a lot of punching, both on the face and not on the face, in that demographic), but one must also consider all the messy purging that purity entails.

1. Earlier this month, Trump suddenly and unilaterally rejected Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision to make Eliott Abrams his own second in command—and not because of Abrams’ involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, which apparently falls under the rubric of scandals that are no longer scandalous. Rather, Trump axed Abrams “after reading news reports about their meeting, which included references to Abrams’ criticisms of Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.” Abrams was never even a Never Trumper, a group that has been blacklisted by the administration.

2. Last week, Ben Carson’s longtime aide and friend Shermichael Singleton was fired when the White House realized he had written an anti-Trump op-ed for The Hill in October. Carson was left speechless and baffled. Singleton was escorted from the building by security. In his op-ed, Shermichael wrote:

We must all search the inner depths of our conscience and ask: Is this what we really want?

3. Over the weekend, the White House forced the resignation of NSC aide Craig Deare after he criticized Trump in a private meeting at a think tank. Apparently Deare complained about the administration’s dysfunction, about Steve Bannon, about a lack of access to the president—and, hilariously, he “gave a detailed and embarrassing readout of Trump’s call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.”

4. And, of course, acting attorney general and Obama-era holdover Sally Yates was fired for refusing to enforce the Muslim travel ban.

It’s so hard to find true believers that the White House is sailing with a skeleton crew. There’s nobody home and no one in charge. We don’t know if they’ve figured out how to turn the lights on yet. As Gertrude Stein put it, there’s no there there. Staffing is such a problem that Steve Bannon had to bring his own Bannon to work. (And he brought in Jeff Sessions’ own Bannon, Stephen Miller, too—everyone has a Bannon now. You’ll soon see that you have one yourself. If, on the night of the new moon, you stand before the mirror in the light of one flickering candle, and regard your own reflection with malice in your heart, the grim outline of the devil on your shoulder shall appear, and its heinous whispers become audible.)

So, what will happen next? Will Trump be forced to let reasonable (if still somewhat unconventional) people do normal jobs, like Acosta and McMaster, or will Trump staff the entire government with “alt-right” radicals, like Julia Hahn and Steve Miller, so the government stops functioning in any way except as a white supremacist propaganda machine? Will he do both things at the same time? 

I have no idea! But, as Gertrude Stein also said, “It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.”

Reports say there is going to be another travel ban soon, perhaps even today. And so, standing on the precipice of our next great catastrophe, I have decided to take stock, as far as I can, of this thing we have wrought, which I can only describe as the new American carnage. Moreover (sorry about this) I would like to put forth my own obnoxious “all else is a distraction” theory:

In my opinion, this is the greatest story of the moment, and all else is a distraction. Think-piece-ologists have recently argued that the “real story” is the dismantling of our administrative state, or the lock-out of the free press from the halls of power, or the Russian oligarchy’s new influence on the Republican party, or so on. But, when the people of the future look back at us now, it seems to me that they will “little note, nor long remember” the exact form of our bureaucracy, or whether we took seriously our own promises to ourselves about freedom of the press, or whether Michael Flynn was actually colluding with the Russian ambassador rather than just wishing him a very very merry Christmas. These things will all be seen as incidental: goings-on as curious and inconsequential as Rudolf Hess in a biplane or Marat in a bathtub. I submit that, for the people of the future, all these stories will be incidental to the story of why we allowed our neighbors to be terrorized and rounded up.

So, I am making a small attempt to bear witness.

I am asking six questions.

Who has been detained?
Who has been denied entry?
Who has been rounded up?
Who has been deported?
Who has fled as a refugee from my country?
Who has been killed here?

Who has been detained? Who has been denied entry?

I’ll start out by admitting I do not have a very clear picture of how many people who were affected by the first travel ban have had their dire situations resolved. There were 100,000 visas revoked and then reinstated; 500,000 green card holders and a presumably gigantic number of dual citizens initially affected; and then of course there were all the hopeful would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers on whom we slammed the door.

There were travelers stranded in airports, many of them students, some of them long-time residents of the United States, some of them persona non grata in their countries of origin who had suddenly been rendered effectively stateless; refugees who had spent years being vetted whose dreams were dashed at the very last moment; relatives about to be reunited with family members after years of separation; visa holders who were deported because they were airborne when the ban was put in place; visitors and refugees who simply hoped to access our healthcare system—one cruel irony of the debacle being that the UN directs refugees with the worst medical problems to the U.S., so some of the most at-risk patients in the world were suddenly in great peril.

I, like you, have read that, after the ban was stayed, some of these thousands of people were able to reach their homes, their doctors, or their new lives, but I do not know about all of them. So, we must first countenance the scale of the devastation of the original ban, and contemplate our inability to grasp the scope of it.

I will list a few cases which I found particularly upsetting at the time:

1. In Louisville, a 14-year-old boy’s immediate family, his mother and brother, were stranded overseas, leaving him to fend for himself.

2. A mother who had been forced to make the awful decision to leave one child behind when she fled Somalia years ago was about to be reunited with her lost son. The ban derailed her plans.

“Why do you hate me, Mommy?” Mohamed asks almost every time they speak. “Why haven’t you come for me?”

3. Even though it was the day after the ban had been stayed, around 140 Somali refugees waiting for their flights to the U.S. were sent back to their refugee camp in Kenya, where some of them have lived their entire lives.

4. A Chicago doctor couldn’t return home from his own wedding.

5. Another doctor, who could not return from a trip to visit his family, is my neighbor. He lives a few blocks from me. He’s back home now. While describing to a reporter how he’d been affected, he unconsciously and selflessly veered into describing how his patients in Brooklyn had been affected:

“My colleagues are going to be affected, hospital’s going to be affected — that’s for sure, as I said, my patients — for sure, yea I have, we are following patients, following all patients, so I have to follow my patients, every one of them, they have to see me,” he said. “So I’m happy that I’m here now, I can see my patients.”

6. And, finally, it’s a small thing to fixate on, but one graduate student’s anguished Facebook post, in which she wrote, “No one cared what will happen to my dog,” makes me nauseous every time I think about it.

(You should watch this adorable video of Nazanin Zinouri and her dog reuniting before we move on to the really bad stuff.)

* * *

But now I want to look at who has been detained or denied entry since a federal court put a stay on the ban, as well as who has been detained or denied entry for reasons that seem clearly linked to their ethnicity or religion, or for no reason at all. There have been some alarming reports:

1. Muhammad Ali, Jr., the son of Muhammad Ali, was detained at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and questioned more than once about his religion.

2. A reporter’s Trinidadian husband, a U.S. permanent resident, whose last name is Ishmael, was detained at the same airport and asked about his ethnicity and “how he got his name.” His legal counsel was threatened with arrest.

3. The Australian children’s book author Mem Fox, on her 117th trip to the United States, was detained and questioned for two hours, for no apparent reason.

4. Sidd Bikkannavar, an American-born scientist who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and who is even a member of the Customs and Border Protection Global Entry program, which requires an extensive background check, was detained and forced to give the passcode for his phone, which contained sensitive government material.

5. A Welsh Muslim schoolteacher was denied entry to the United States while he was chaperoning a school trip, for no apparent reason. The teacher’s employer, demanding answers from the U.S. Embassy in London, said in a statement that “Mr Miah’s removal from the flight left pupils and colleagues shocked and distressed.” Miah himself said:

“Everyone was looking at me. As I was getting my luggage the teachers and kids were confused. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I was being escorted out. It made me feel like a criminal. I couldn’t speak, I was lost for words.”

6. A Jordanian citizen, a 22-year-old college graduate, had his valid U.S. tourist visa canceled and was deported because he was born in Syria. He described an alarming scene:

Abu Romman says the officer told him he would not be allowed to call his embassy before he signed papers agreeing to be deported. He says he wasn’t allowed to phone a lawyer or a family member.

“He said, ‘If you refuse to sign the papers … I will ban you from entering the United States for the rest of your life,'” Abu Romman says.

He was told he would be deported the following morning.

CBP officers took his jacket, his belt, his phone and his shoelaces, he says, and put him in a cold cell with a steel door and open toilet, along with five other people.

“I sat there and introduced myself to my cellmates. Most of them were engineers or something,” Abu Romman says.

There were five mattresses on the floor for six people. Abu Romman says everyone crammed into the cell had advanced degrees, including an Indian engineer working for an American company.

Syrian cinematographer Khaled Khateeb, a member of the Syrian Civil Defense, who provided video for the Oscar-winning documentary "The White Helmets", in Istanbul, Monday, Feb. 27, 2017. The young volunteer in the Syrian search-and-rescue group featured in an Academy Award-winning documentary said Monday he hopes the award will help stop "massacres" in his country, and described a U.S. decision to block him from traveling to Los Angeles for the Oscars as "America's loss." (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

7. The cinematographer for The White Helmets, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, was prevented by the U.S., at the last minute, from flying from Turkey for the awards ceremony, supposedly because Syria would not recognize his passport. The White Helmets won the Oscar.

8. A 28-year-old software engineer traveling from Nigeria on business was held for several hours at JFK and, strangely, given a test which “looked suspiciously like the officer simply Googled, ‘Questions to ask a software engineer.'”

After Omin attempted to complete the ridiculous test designed to prove he was, in fact, a software engineer, he was informed by a customs official (who he suspects wasn’t technically trained) that his responses were incorrect.

“No one would tell me why I was being questioned. Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me … I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare,” Omin told LinkedIn.

“That is when I thought I would never get into the United States.”

As Omin sat, convinced he would be denied access into the United States, an official suddenly told him he was free to go. Without any further explanation, the official apparently said, “Look, I am going to let you go, but you don’t look convincing to me.”

Tired and discouraged, he simply walked out of the office without responding[.]

9. A curator who has lived legally in the U.S. for a decade, and who runs an architecture and design studio in New York, was denied entry to the U.S. on his way back from a trip to Argentina, for no known reason. He described his brutal treatment by Customs and Border Patrol officers:

A border patrol officer denied him legal counsel, claiming that “lawyers had no jurisdiction at the borders.” Mosqueda was interrogated under oath and threatened with a five-year expulsion from the US if he did not answer his questions honestly. […] He was detained for fourteen hours before his trip back. During this time he was not permitted to contact anyone or access any of his belongings. He was eventually escorted to a plane by two armed officers and was told he would not receive any of his documents until he got back to Buenos Aires.

10. And, because irony is truly dead, one of France’s preeminent public intellectuals, the Holocaust scholar Henry Rousso, was detained for at least 10 hours and nearly deported, for no known reason. He was born in Egypt.

Rousso’s scholarship focuses on the memory of the Vichy regime, the darkest chapter in modern French history, when the government of unoccupied France collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II. Vichy authorities are particularly infamous for assisting the Germans in rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Jews from France during the Holocaust[.]

Who has been rounded up? Who has been deported?

While the ban has been wreaking havoc at airports, the hunt for undocumented immigrants has been wreaking havoc everywhere else (and at airports).

1. Of the 680 people arrested in immigration raids across the country in the second week of February, only 75% had criminal convictions, and it has not been made clear how many of those convictions were violent crimes as opposed to non-violent crimes such as traffic violations, or the immigrant-specific crimes of having once been deported or having used fake identification documents.

2. In Arizona, a 35-year-old mother of two, who has lived in the U.S. since she was 14 years old, was detained and deported at a routine check-in with immigration officials, which she had been attending for 8 years, ever since having been caught using a fake social security number.

3. Another mother of two ditched her routine check-in and has sought sanctuary in a church in Denver, so as not to be separated from her kids.

The room holds two beds, a lamp propped on a cardboard box, and a Valentine from her youngest daughter. “I could be here days, months, maybe even years,” she said.

Daniela Vargas speaks about the recent immigration raid that picked up more than 50 allegedly undocumented immigrants including her father and brother during a news conference Wednesday, March 1, 2017, at the Jackson, Miss., city hall. A short time after the news conference, Vargas was detained by ICE officials. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

4. Daniela Vargas, a 21-year-old who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old and who is theoretically protected from deportation under DACA, “barricaded herself in a closet” when ICE agents raided her home last week. They arrested her father and brother. She was discovered, handcuffed, but ultimately released at that time.

Vargas emerged from hiding on Wednesday to give a press conference in Jackson, Mississippi. She was arrested by ICE agents immediately afterward. She is subject to removal without a hearing because she is classified as a “visa-overstay” and her DACA renewal application (DACA recipients must reapply every two years) is pending.

At her press conference, Vargas said:

“Today, my father and brother await deportation while I continue to fight this battle as a DREAMer to help contribute to this country, which I feel is very much my country.”

5. In Seattle, a 23-year-old theoretically protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), who has no criminal record, was arrested during a raid on his father’s home and is being held in detention. Officials claim he is a gang member, which he denies.

6. Everyone disembarking from a domestic flight from SFO to JFK was instructed to “show their papers” to Customs and Border Patrol agents, despite the fact that no border had been crossed by the passengers. CBP later confirmed they were searching for an undocumented immigrant.

A CBP spokesperson wrote to Rolling Stone on Friday to insist that the ID check on the jetbridge was “consensual assistance from passengers aboard the flight” and that “CBP did not compel” anyone to show ID.

7. More than 50 people were detained in immigration raids on Asian restaurants in Mississippi.

“Right now, the paranoia and sense of fear is overwhelming,” said Ramiro Orozco, an immigration attorney based in Jackson. “All the raids and the rhetoric coming from the new administration have created so much anxiety. We’re getting to the point that people are pulling their children out of school, they’re not going to work.”

8. Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco, father of three and manager of a Mexican restaurant in West Frankfurt, Illinois, was detained and held for 20 days. The town is in shock.

Tom Jordan, the mayor of West Frankfort, wrote that Mr. Hernandez was a “great asset” to the city who “doesn’t ask for anything in return.” The fire chief described him as “a man of great character.”

The letters have piled up — from the county prosecutor, the former postmaster, the car dealer, the Rotary Club president. In his note, Richard Glodich, the athletic director at Frankfort Community High School, wrote, “As a grandson of immigrants, I am all for immigration reform, but this time you have arrested a GOOD MAN […]”

Hernandez was released on bond, but still faces possible deportation.

Who has fled as a refugee from my country?

The number of asylum-seekers illegally crossing the border from the US to Canada has increased drastically in the past year.

1. At the Quebec-U.S. border crossing alone, the number has more than doubled:

In early February, 42 asylum claims were filed in just a weekend at Quebec’s land borders. In January there were 506 applications in total and many believe the number will increase. Colombia, Syria, Eritrea, Iraq and Burundi topped the applications list.

Two people who told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police they are from Sudan speak with an officer after crossing into Canada from Perry Mills, N.Y., near Hemmingford, Quebec, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

2. Another significant crossing point is Emerson, a town on the Manitoba-North Dakota border. The weather there is bitterly cold. On Christmas Eve, two men who had fled Ghana out of fear of being persecuted for being gay and Muslim, but who had been denied asylum in the U.S. and were facing deportation back to Ghana, made the dangerous trek.

Disoriented from the cold and suffering severe frostbite, the pair eventually stumbled upon a highway, where a trucker stopped to help them.

Both men ended up in hospital; Mohammed had to have all of his fingers amputated, while Iyal lost all of his fingers except for his thumbs to frostbite.

Who has been killed here?

1. Two Indian nationals at a bar in Kansas were gunned down by a man shouting “get out of my country” and racial slurs. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old engineer, was killed. The assailant later told a bartender he had shot “two Iranians.”

It worth noting that in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the state Republican party of Kansas sent out mailers which made “undisguised appeals to people’s fears that radical Islamist terrorism might overwhelm Kansas.”

“Have You Met the New Neighbors?” read the bold letters on the envelope of one mailer, next to an image of an apparent Muslim terrorist. “ISIS is not going away anytime soon,” read the envelope’s script.

A mailer sent out by the Kansas state Republican party during the presidential campaign. Via the Southern Poverty Law Center.

* * *

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us here: since January 1, there have been four American mosques burned to the ground, 100 bomb threats against American Jewish synagogues and cultural centers, and two American Jewish cemeteries vandalized in acts of mass desecration. Millions of American schoolchildren are frightened because the government is about to take their parents away. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are preparing to house more people than ever before in private prisons and detention centers. People in other countries are afraid to visit or send their children here. I suppose my thesis is that if we have been waiting for something to happen, we should consider that maybe it is happening already.

So, where does that leave us? It leaves us, I think, with one more list.

Who has done the right thing?

1. In a remarkable report, Buzzfeed reveals that hundreds of churches across the country are preparing to house immigrants seeking sanctuary. Some have gone so far as to renovate church buildings with new bedrooms and showers, and to organize networks of church members willing to hide undocumented immigrants in their homes. Church leaders further attest that they are ready to take their operations underground if necessary, and to participate in a modern-day underground railroad which would ferry undocumented immigrants to Canada.

2. Ian Grillot, a patron at the bar where Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani were attacked, was also gravely injured when he tried to catch the gunman.

3. Muslim groups are raising money to pay for the cleanup of desecrated Jewish cemeteries.

4. And when eight asylums-seekers, including four children and an elderly woman who left her walker behind in her haste, barely made it over the Canadian border after dodging a Customs and Border Patrol officer, journalists for Reuters witnessed a moment of quiet decency which gives me hope. The refugees, as they fled, left behind all their worldly possessions scattered in the snow:

Officers on both sides momentarily eyed the luggage strewn in the snow before the U.S. officer took it, and a walker left on the road, to the border line.

If we continue down this path, then such acts of decency will become more important in the weeks and months ahead.

Army Capt. Matthew Ball, right, prepares to hug his former interpreter Qismat Amin, as Amin arrives from Afghanistan, at San Francisco International Airport Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017, in San Francisco. Ball welcomed Amin to the United States after buying him a plane ticket to ensure he would get in quickly amid concerns the Trump administration may expand its travel ban to Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

* * *

Dana Snitzky is a Longreads contributing editor.

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about truth and lies, fact and fiction.

In his new book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt tells us Shakespeare was constantly asking himself the question, “Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to?” — plus a whole host of follow-up questions:

Why would anyone… be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

In Shakespeare’s view, Greenblatt goes on to say, the answer is pretty basic: because when tyranny is ascendant, everyone, from the counselors to the mob, is complicit, a complicity brought on by maliciousness, fear, or a total failure to come to terms with what is happening — and maybe even a bit of enjoyment of the spectacle.  

In her new book The Death of Truth (reviewed by Bridey Heing), Michiko Kakutani says the answer is perhaps more postmodern, citing this moment as emblematic of our times:

“When called out for claiming FBI statistics were only “theoretically true,” Newt Gingrich responded, “What I said was equally true. People feel it.”

The truth is what we feel — and, conversely, anyone who describes how we feel seems to be telling the truth. In her critical takedown of Jordan Peterson’s work, Laurie Penny writes:

In times of angst and confusion, anyone who accurately describes how you feel will briefly seem like God’s own prophet. This, as any half-decent writer can tell you, is a talent that is extremely easy to abuse.

Storytelling looks, suddenly, dangerous — a way of creating truth through feeling rather than fact. In an interview with Hope Reese, Alice Bolin addresses this not as a practice of a single demagogue or huckster, but a whole society:

I think we need to take into consideration what stories have been told before, what stories have been told to death, and the kinds of messages that we’re sending by reusing these same tropes over and over.

In the detective stories we all love, in which a Dead Girl is discovered and her death is mysteriously unexplained, the tropes take on the status of myths, and the myths obfuscate two important truths about Dead Girls — that normally their deaths are totally explainable, even predictable:

When we frame these murder stories as mysteries, we have to excise that part of the story that makes who did it obvious. If you watch Dateline or whatever, they say, “Oh, we always have to eliminate the people closest to the victim.” And they don’t exactly say: men are always murdering their wives.

And that when many Dead Girls turn up in one place, it’s not because one person is killing them, but because everyone is:

I feel like, often, the truth — like in the stories of the Juarez murders or the Highway of Tears in Canada — is that those are a lot of different murderers. The truth is that… the murderer is almost a collective of violent misogynists.  

Bolin is discussing the misrepresentation of truth in fiction — in an interview with Naomi Elias, Ingrid Rojas Contreras talks about the disintegration of truth in reality:

Your biggest worry when you’re living in a violent country is that you are not fast enough or smart enough to detangle what’s going on around you. You feel at all times like “maybe this is a dangerous situation, but I don’t have the power to know.”

She’s talking about the situation in Colombia during her childhood, under the thumb of Pablo Escobar. Stephen Greenblatt, speaking of Richard III, says the confusion cultivated by a dictator, the inability to know what is happening, causes many people living under tyranny to be unable to process facts or contemplate the obvious, even if their lives are in danger:

Then there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.

The tyrant, the liar who spreads confusion in order to prop up his own position, can, of course, exist on a much smaller scale. In fact, the tyrant can often be found in the home. Rafia Zakaria enumerates Hemingway’s emotional abuses of his wives and mistresses. He wrote the novel Across the River and Into the Sea while married to Mary Welsh Hemingway and conducting an affair with the much younger Adriana Ivancich. The book is dedicated to Mary, but is clearly a chronicle of his relationship with Adriana. His deceit snakes into the book and worms out as a revisionist history, fiction becoming a means to assuage a guilty conscience, to perpetuate and simultaneously reveal a lie, to gaslight some women:

When memorable moments with Adriana were not enough material, he borrowed them from moments that belonged to Mary, “an absolutely perfect present” selected and purchased for the latter becoming in the book an offering to the former.

Rojas Contreras addresses the dictator or strongman’s ability not just to use language for spreading confusion — such as, say, writing a novel in which he steals his wife’s memories and gives them to his mistress — but to warp the language of others around himself:

In the novel I call him the “King Midas of words,” and that’s true. If he had a lawyer in the news, they would call that lawyer a ‘narco-lawyer,’ and if he had an estate or farm they would call that the ‘narco-estate’ — and they wouldn’t even reference Pablo Escobar, but it was understood by all the people watching the news that he had a hand in it somehow.

But Rojas Contreras also says that language will change to protect its users, to help them navigate a treacherous world:

As a writer I pay very close attention to words… There’s a way in which a very specific atmosphere of tension will give rise to new language in order to be more exact about where you are safe and where you are unsafe, in order to name the very specific situation around you.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about identities — mistaken, misunderstood, transformed, false, fictional or as anonymous as the op-ed.

In his interview with Cooper Lee Bombardier, Thomas Page McBee says that when he transitioned, he “just felt so limited, so suddenly afraid of becoming the kind of man I’d grown up in fear of.” Becoming someone you don’t want to be, he realizes, happens when you have not come to terms with who you already have been, or who you’ve failed to be:

I’m of the belief that we all have to face our own rejected parts — what Jung calls our shadows — in order to genuinely make a cultural shift.

When identities shift, cultures will follow; there is political power generated by self-actualization. As Alana Mohamed writes in her review of Michelle Tea’s essay collection Against Memoir, “It’s a forceful thing, to show up in a world that doesn’t expect you to exist, and to say something it doesn’t expect you to say.” But Mohamed also warns of the erasure of triumph, the cleaning-up inherent in actualization:

[Radical queer women who fought for queer visibility in the ’80s and ’90s] were dying not of marriage inequality, but of addiction, trauma, and poverty. If we forget them and their stories, queer history becomes nothing more than a slogan.

She argues for a cacophony of viewpoints and conflicting definitions: a queerness that “seeks to make room for us to name ourselves,” that is “ever-expanding and ever-in-conflict with itself because of this.” Mohamed imagines a hopeful future for queer identity, for all identity, pointing to the powerful potential of memory and community, even as she probes a deep rift that has breached queer culture — the Rashomon-esque inability of people to remember the same stories or to honor the same heroes: “Who threw the first punch, or glass, or heel at Stonewall? Everyone has their version of what happened that night on June 29, 1969.” A huge feud has developed over the identity of who led the charge.

Preoccupied with this same interplay of history, memory and identity, Christian Kracht’s novel The Dead erases beloved heroes of the Golden Age of film and replaces them with ghoulish impostors, rank fascists and bloviating imperialists: Charlie Chaplin is no longer the crusading satirist who created The Great Dictator, but rather he is the dictator. In his review, J.W. McCormack says this restructuring of famous personalities is an incursion of history into identity, the reality of the 1930s reshaping its legacy, its art:

As cultural monuments in any of the arts prosper, the actual culture that produced them so often plummets — into tyranny, a defiant ignorance, and death.

It’s a startling assertion that who we are and the world we will leave behind are two not-particularly-connected things. Identity can look suddenly like nothing more than another peril in a life full of them, a treacherous path in a dangerous world. “A big part of toxic masculinity is to not question anything about being a man,” McBee says. “It felt to me very dangerous to do so, even in writing this book.” Tea reflects on how her warts-and-all approach to documenting her queer contemporaries was just another way of hurting them: “It’s one thing to discuss your family’s trauma with other family; it’s another thing entirely to release their stories to a world that doesn’t love them.” In Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, when a man misstates a murdered woman’s identity, it provokes a mob of online harassers to cast doubt on his:

And, as Levi Vonk writes in his review of Mario Chard’s poetry collection Land of Fire, identity is a tool of state power, predicated on arbitrary qualities, such as through which entrance you entered a space. And “as soon it is determined that the bird has not entered through the door — the only legitimate entrance — everything unravels”:

How did the bird get inside the house?
Through the door I said.
No. Through a window. Listen they said How did the
bird get inside the house?

The questioning continues until it has abstracted all qualities of the bird:

The bird is nameless. Who named the bird?
I said No one. The bird is nameless.
What is your name? They said.
I am nameless I said.

In her interview with Bridey Heing, Olivia Laing says she wrote her sort-of-autofictional novel Crudo to interrogate such rigid categorizations, to ask “How does one learn to be less selfish? How does one learn to soften one’s borders?” She says:

It’s a personal question, but it’s also a political question. That’s the same force that leads people to say “I don’t want immigrants in my country.”

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On the other hand, in her interview with Ryan Chapman, novelist Ling Ma asks, more or less, what has identity got to do with anything? Her protagonist, she says, became exasperated with her when she wrote an immigration narrative for the character’s family. The character refused to even tell the story, thinking it pointless:

That was really difficult to write because I feel like any time a character is a minority, their narrative is automatically an immigration narrative. Growing up I used to get asked the question where do you come from? I grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas, so you would hear that a lot.

I was just like, Can we just not have a character who needs to explain how she got to the U.S.? I think my difficulty with that came through. With chapter sixteen, there’s no first person. I couldn’t get Candace to talk about it. When I was writing it she was going, This is really cheesy, I’m not a part of this. So I had an omniscient narrator and then let her take over that chapter gradually.

Catherine Lacey, in an interview with Tobias Carroll, doesn’t get into debates with her characters about identity. Instead, she inhabits their identities so thoroughly that she marvels at how she has ended up writing something she would never say herself:

I don’t know. I don’t even remember quite where I was when I wrote that [story] to be honest. I think that one just came like from that character. I’m not sure if I would ever say that. In my life, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t use that description, at least in an honest way. But that character, he just said that….

I feel like when I’m writing in a place that’s really authentic and honest, it does feel a little bit like acting in a way. And then, I’m creating some sort of character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.

This slipperiness of self isn’t just for fiction writers; you really never can know quite who you are going to become — you might die before it happens. As Susan Hand Shetterly writes in Seaweed Chronicles: A World at Water’s Edge, the British algae scientist Kathleen Drew-Baker never set foot in Japan, and yet, years after her death, her discoveries “revolutionized the harvest and consumption of seaweed in that country.” Now she is revered in Japan as the Mother of the Sea. You can visit her shrine. In death we become godlike, our small achievements in life having profound, ripple-like effects on the future; we take our exalted place in the grand human story.

(Kracht, of course, takes a different position: “The dead are profoundly lonesome creatures, there is no solidarity among them, they are all born alone, die, and are reborn alone as well.”)

So how to proceed? Be careful, Lacey warns. Remember your identity is porous:

I feel like I’m always making language out of the language that’s around me… I’m very careful. I don’t really watch a lot of series. I pretty much only watch a TV series if I’m on a plane, and I’m like really careful about what I read and when I read it. And I’m careful about who I talk to and who I spend my time around. I think it’s true for everybody, but I can’t really say it for everybody, but for me, it’s definitely true that I’m always writing a story out of the language that I surround myself with.

And as McBee points out, there is one upside to identity — most of who you are is in the past:

I’ve come to realize that everyone passes. Most of us aren’t walking around with our souls out all the time, being everything that we are and ever have been.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

A lot of what you’ll read in this month’s books newsletter is about things not seeming to be what they really are.

In an interview with Hope Reese, Rebecca Traister talks about how women’s anger is not recognized as a politically valid form of expression, even though history tells a different story — that women’s anger has the power to start revolutions! Moreover:

“Women are punished for expressing their anger… their anger is discouraged, and part of this punishment is that your having expressed anger can be turned against you to discredit you.”

The power women feel is not recognized for what it is. And not just the power — also the pain. In an interview with Wei Tchou, Tanya Marquardt discusses the process of interrogating her memories of sexual assault, and explains how writing her memoir forced her to finally describe events as they really happened:

“I found myself struggling with the language around consent and really asking myself, ‘What was happening in that scene?’… I had to come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t consented, and more than that, I thought it was my job to endure whatever he was going to do to me.”

In an interview with Victoria Namkung, Nicole Chung talks about how difficult it was, as a grown-up adoptee, to let go of her “origin story,” which, although it had always felt safe, was not real:

“Even though it wasn’t the whole truth, I was so comforted and so attached to this origin story I was given. I remember how difficult it was to start challenging that.”

Mr. Rogers was deeply concerned about children who believe in stories that are comforting but not real. He thought it could be downright dangerous for them. According to his biographer Maxwell King,

“When Fred Rogers and David Newell learned about the child who hurt himself trying to be a superhero, they came up with an idea: a special program to help kids grasp just what a fictional superhero is.”

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On the other hand, in her book Travelers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd describes how, in the 1930s, the British establishment had a striking lack of concern when it came to exposing children to false ideas. The well-off continued to send their young-adult children to be educated in Germany once the Nazi regime was in power:

“That the British establishment should have seen fit to prepare its offspring for adult life by sending them to such a vile totalitarian regime is puzzling, to say the least…. despite the Great War and growing awareness of Nazi iconoclasm, Germany’s traditional grip on British intellectual imagination remained as strong as ever. Here, in the midst of Nazi barbarity and boorishness, these gilded youths were expected to deepen their education and broaden their outlook.”

(From Maxwell King’s biography of Mr. Rogers: “One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable.”)

Boyd goes on to say: “Ariel Tennant, another teenager in Munich at the time, studying art, was struck by how many people in England refused to believe her accounts of Nazi aggression.”

(This past weekend, I saw a video online of a proto-fascist gang beating some people in New York. The police did not arrest them. After the beating, the gang members posed for a photograph, all of them making similar hand signs for the camera.)

(In her novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis writes: “The feeling of closeness to a time before — the familiar melancholy that came from surfing the internet in the ways she used to — had receded and been replaced by the new feeling, the one she struggled to describe.”)

In her review of two recent books about immigrant families applying for asylum, Martha Pskowski writes about how, in her work with migrants, she would find that, the longer they talked to her, the more likely their stories were to change — because telling a story can be dangerous, and they were trying to keep people safe:

“Sometimes, migrants would tell me one story, and then as we talked over time, another story emerged. ….In Southern Mexico where I carry out interviews, coyotes and gang members often seek information about men and women on the migrant trail, to then threaten their family members. This doesn’t mean immigrants are unreliable sources, this means that as journalists we must work harder to earn their trust and prevent negative consequences of our work.”

Pskowski goes on to say: “Increasingly, and controversially, journalists are acknowledging and even embracing the concept that true ‘objectivity’ is both unachievable and undesirable.”

(This month a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The story of how it happened has been revised many times. Changing stories are often a sign of danger — the journalist’s job is, sometimes, just to ask who is in danger for telling the story. Sometimes the answer is: the journalist.)

(Anna Moschovakis: “The new feeling: a flesh-eating virus expanding its appetite beneath the skin.”)

In her book How Does It Feel To Be Unwanted?, Eileen Truax writes about the re-categorization of asylum-seekers as threats to national security:

“Since the beginning of the Trump administration, policy changes in how immigration laws are applied indicate that authorities may use their discretion to qualify any violation of the law as a ‘crime,’ widely and arbitrarily broadening the spectrum of people who could be considered a ‘danger’ to the country. People like Yamil, who was charged with using false documents and has a previous deportation on his record, could be deemed a threat to national security.”

(Nicole Chung: “I’d been led to believe racism was something in the past. Even teachers at school presented racism as a thing we had conquered. It was very well-intentioned and wrong.”)

In his review of several new books about the opioid crisis, Zachary Siegel writes that the danger isn’t always where you think it is:

“A recent study out of Stanford that modeled public health policy shows that aggressively controlling the supply of prescriptions, in the short-term, is actually increasing overdose deaths by the thousands…. The fact is, injecting a regulated pharmaceutical of known dose and purity is less risky than injecting a bag of white powder purchased on the street. Bags of dope come with no proof of ingredients…. At the end of the day, an 80 milligram OxyContin is always 80 milligrams. It may not be pretty… but at least there was a measure of safety.”

And neither the heroes nor the villains are who you think they should be:

“A simplistic narrative yields cheap, simplistic solutions. America’s opioid reporting has the tendency to chronicle lengthy police investigations that feature cops, federal agents, and prosecutors high on the delusion that shutting down the right pill mill or locking up the right dealer will put addiction and overdoses to a grinding halt. They think they’re in an episode of The Wire.”

There are dire consequence for misunderstanding what the story is really about:

“Choking off the supply of prescription painkillers early on in the crisis, without first installing a safety net to catch the fallout, was a major policy failure that worsened America’s opioid problem by orders of magnitude.”

(Anna Moschovakis: “Or, the new feeling: a helixed grating, eternal return.”)

(Tanya Marquardt: “Once you can see the pattern and what you are repeating, you can see how it is abusive to you, and then you can change.”)

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2018 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

Books about being alone and really owning it.

Patricia Hampl on the Ladies of Llangollen, who were famous for wanting to be left alone; Stephanie Rosenbloom on eating alone; and an interview with novelist Ottessa Moshfegh in which she strongly advises against leaning in.

Books about family. 

Meaghan O’Connell and Juan Vidal on the surprise and profundity of becoming new parents; Nicole Chung and Laura June on the complexities of family connection across the generations when grappling with adoption or estrangement; Christian Donlan on the grief and joy of parenting while gravely ill; and Issac Bailey on his family’s resilience in the wake of his brother’s imprisonment.

Books for the women in your life who are mad. 

Gemma Hartley on emotional labor, Brittney Cooper on black women’s eloquent rage, and Rebecca Traister on the political power of women’s anger.

Books of investigations, inquiries, and revelations. 

Karina Longworth reveals how Hollywood’s women were caught in Howard Hughes’ web of lies; Rachel Slade solves the sinking of El Faro; Alec Nevala-Lee unravels the joined-at-the-hip origin stories of Scientology and American science fiction; Susan Orlean investigates the mystery of the Los Angeles Public Library fire; Brantley Hargrove follows in the footsteps of a storm chaser killed by the largest tornado every recorded; and Tim Mohr chronicles the forgotten role of punk rock in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Books that explore the bounds of physical and mental health, illness and medicine, mind and body.

Porochista Khakpour, in a searing memoir about surviving a misdiagnosed chronic illness, questions the possibility of total recovery; Terese Maire Mailhot, in a lyric memoir about PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, attempts to reclaim her narrative and reconnect with her people; Christie Watson remembers her twenty years as a nurse before becoming a novelist; Kristi Coulter meditates on her newfound sobriety and a culture of silence around women’s addiction; Marina Benjamin ruminates on insomnia, plumbing the depths of sleep and wakefulness; and Michele Lent Hirsch studies the invisible lives of young women with chronic illnesses

Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Colin G. Calloway‘s biography of George Washington conscientiously locates him in a very Indian world; Julia Boyd points out that the Third Reich was a popular tourist destination; Linda Gordon explains the sway the KKK held in state governments in the early 20th century; Shomari Wills chronicles America’s first black millionaires; Peter Ackroyd reveals the history of gay London; and Stefan Bradley remembers the fight for civil rights in the Ivy League.

Books about dating and marriage.

Elizabeth Flock on the years she spent living with married couples in Mumbai to better understand their marriages; Kelli María Korducki on the feminist history of breaking up; Viv Albertine on dating again in her fifties. 

Follow the money.

Anand Giridharadas on the elite, Disneyfied world of Ted Talks and philanthropy as self-help for rich people; David Montero on the global corporate bribery network; Sarah Smarsh on growing up rural and working class. 

Fiction and memoirs that reflect on the way we live now, illuminating our present and hinting at possible futures.

Nick Drnaso‘s Sabrina is haunted by the menace of conspiracy theories and fake news; Ling Ma‘s Severance imagines a world in which office drones keep going to work and posting on social media even though it’s the apocalypse; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah‘s Friday Black points out that being black in America already is a dystopian nightmare; Olivia Laing‘s Crudo was written in real time during — and is about living through — the collective traumatic experience that was the year 2017; Jamel Brinkley‘s A Lucky Man revolves around the lucklessness of black boyhood and manhood; Nafissa Thompson-Spires‘ Heads of the Colored People is a witty, darkly comic look at a supposedly post-racial America; Kiese Laymon‘s Heavy critiques a nation unwilling to come to terms with its traumatic past; Thomas Page McBee‘s Amateur tries to understand why men fight; and Sharmila Sen‘s Not Quite Not White explores how integral whiteness can be to our idea of Americanness.

Books of journeys, adventures, and migrations.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on the scrappy New York teen who stowed away on a 1928 expedition to Antarctica; Laura Smith on vanishing as a way to reclaim your life; William E. Glassley on his geological expeditions to Greeland to uncover the world’s oldest secret; Lauren Hilgers on Chinese political dissidents building a new life in New York; Eileen Truax on Mexican immigrants living in fear of deportation in America; and Lauren Markham on Salvadoran teens seeking safety far away from home.

Books about faith.

Meghan O’Gieblyn‘s essays hinge on faith and feeling left behind in the Midewst; R.O. Kwon‘s novel The Incendiaries tests the fault lines of lost faith and violence; Jessica Wilbanks‘ memoir is a search for her childhood faith’s origins.

Cultural studies and criticism.

Maya Rao on the patriarchal mentality in the oil boomtowns of North Dakota; Elizabeth Rush on the first areas of the U.S. affected by rising sea levels; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae on the white mothers who violently opposed school integration in the South; Rowan Moore Gerety on daily life in Mozambique, one of the world’s fastest growing economies; Christopher C. King on Europe’s oldest surviving folk music tradition; Agnès Poirer on the intellectual life that flourished in postwar Paris; Alice Bolin on our obsession with dead girls; Michelle Tea on the perils of queer memoir; and Natalie Hopkinson on art as political protest.

Books that are about just one specific thing.

Susan Hand Shetterly on seaweed, Richard Sugg on fairies, Michael Engelhard on polar bears. 

Happy holidays!
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We asked eleven authors to tell us about an amazing book that we might have missed in 2018.

Kiese Laymon
Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi; author of several books, including most recently the memoir Heavy.

The Reckonings by Lacy Johnson (Scribner)

I read, reread and loved Lacy Johnson’s new book, The Reckonings. I was shocked by how Lacy really complicated my understandings of justice, disaster and just art. In a way that hopefully sounds sincere and not sentimental, Lacy made me think, and actually believe, justice was possible, and art must lead the way. The flip is that the book subtextually forced me to reckon with the roles art and artists have in sanctioning suffering, which forced me to reconsider justice as this clearly demarcated destination. I actually think The Reckonings, Eloquent Rage, and No Ashes in The Fire are in this radical three-pronged conversation with each other in 2018 about where we’ve been, and what we do with where we’ve been. They are masterfully conceived projects and generously constructed. At the root of all three are warnings, rightful celebrations, and lush ass uses of language.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Writer of fiction, author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People.

Meet Behind Mars by Renee Simms (Wayne State University Press)

Short story collections — often maligned because they “don’t sell” — have garnered their fair share of attention this year, with several making popular “best of” lists and longlists for major literary awards. And I am totally here for that. Short stories are not just practice runs for the novel, but a respectable and challenging genre all on their own.

I wish, however, that one well-deserving collection were much more visible. I first learned of Renee Simms’ Meet Behind Mars last winter and immediately invited her (and Jamel Brinkley) to join me in proposing a debut short-story writers panel for AWP (an annual writers’ conference). The book’s stories range from darkly humorous to melancholic, all connected by vibrant detail and lush settings (New Orleans, a pawnshop, academia, the 1970s, now). At the conference, Renee gave a reading of the collection’s titular epistolary story that was such a hit with the crowd that I was afraid to read (after her) my own epistolary story, also about the school woes of black children.

It’s not that Meet Behind Mars has remained completely obscure. Tayari Jones has championed it, blurbing the book and mentioning it as a favorite on NPR. And if you won’t take my word for it, please, take Tayari’s. It’s just that the book deserves to be read more widely, savored, and carefully listed as a required text on spring-semester syllabi across the world. It’s short enough to enjoy in one day, but you’ll likely still be thinking about the stories long after you’ve closed the book.

R.O. Kwon
Author of the novel The Incendiaries.

Bad Friends by Ancco (Drawn & Quarterly)

This year, I’ve been reading a lot more graphic novels and memoirs. I’ve wondered why this is, and I think it could have to do with the fact that, in 2018, I published my first book, a novel. I’ve spent more time out in public, and on social media, than I ever have. In the midst of so much chatter, so many words, it’s possible I’ve been particularly attracted to silence, and to depictions thereof. Graphic books, or so I’ve been finding, are especially well suited to portraying varieties of silence.

One of my favorite graphic-novel reads this year was Ancco’s Bad Friends, translated by Janet Hong. It’s set in South Korea, outside of Seoul, and the adult narrator, Jinju, looks back on a lost childhood friendship. There’s a great deal of violence in this book, and terrible cycles of physical and emotional abuse; in the midst of so much pain, the narrator finds a kindred soul in a close friend, Jung-ae. What follows is a heartbreaking, powerful story about the enchantments and limitations of love. This is a wonderful book.

Alice Bolin
Critic, essayist, journalist, and poet; Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Memphis; author of the collection Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.

The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time by Nell Stevens (Doubleday)

I admit this is the kind of assignment that gives me anxiety. I have no way of knowing what books you, the reader, may have missed, and I suspect they are probably the same ones I did, considering the determinist paradox of personalized algorithms on shopping and social media websites. That said, the 2018 book I would like to show a little love is the genre-defying memoir The Victorian and the Romantic, by one of my new favorite nonfiction writers, Nell Stevens. The book follows Stevens as she begins a PhD program in English literature in London and falls in deep, long distance love with a former classmate, an American. Paralleling this narrative, Stevens weaves a semi-fictional story of the emotional love affair between Victorian novelist (and Charlotte Brontë’s friend and biographer) Elizabeth Gaskell and American author Charles Eliot Norton. In the UK, Stevens’ book is titled Mrs. Gaskell and I, and I guess we have this alternate title because Americans don’t know who Gaskell is (upside down smiley face emoji). But Stevens inhabits the earlier writer’s interiority with such empathy and audacious sentimentality, the reader can’t help but feel the same connection to Gaskell that Stevens does. The Victorian and the Romantic embodies all the possibility and playfulness I love about the nonfiction genre, using both historical fiction and more traditional memoir as techniques to examine Stevens’ own experience: to comment on her journey through academia and the impossible intimacy scholars seek with their subjects.

Maya Rao
Journalist and author of Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier.

Voices From the Rust Belt edited by Anne Trubek (Picador)

Nonfiction chronicles of the heartland too often involve familiar tales of downtrodden factory workers or coastal authors bemoaning Middle Americans’ conservative politics. Yet this anthology offers a fresh, original perspective on the industrial Midwest that includes reflections on a shut-down gay bar in Cincinnati, the bonds of Iraqi immigrants in Cleveland, and the haunting culture of a prison town in West Virginia. One of the best pieces is told from the point of view of a middle-aged social worker in Pittsburgh struggling to help a man name John who “nods like he’s defeated, like jail and everything else have already won.” Another memorable essay explores Henry Ford’s legacy and the “lifeless” suburban communities of the Motor City, concluding that “while Detroit rots, the nostalgic, fauxtopian villages that surround that city are a vision of history some would rather embrace.” The book prominently addresses race, particularly with a witty, acerbic essay that ridicules white newcomers trying to save Detroit. Though uneven at times, Rust Belt offers an authentic portrayal of a region that often makes the national news but too rarely gets captured with such range and nuance.

Alec Nevala-Lee
Author of Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois (Bloomsbury)

On November 8, 1992, the second half of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes premiered in Los Angeles, leading one critic to describe the play as arriving “at the very pivot of American history, when the Republican ice age it depicts has begun to melt away.” A quarter of a century later, the wheel has come full circle, and Kushner’s masterpiece — featuring a fictionalized version of the lawyer Roy Cohn, whose most successful apprentice now sits in the White House — seems more relevant than ever. The World Only Spins Forward chronicles the play’s birth, reception, and surprising afterlife in the words of those who made it, and it paints a compelling picture of the community of actors, producers, activists, and stage professionals who transformed a playwright’s private vision into a theatrical and cultural event rivaled in our time only by Hamilton. The result is a valuable document of its era, a treasure trove of gossip and creative insight, and a handbook for surviving as an artist in the face of indifference and oppression, and its message urgently deserves to be heard at a moment when what Kushner calls “the Great Work” prepares to begin yet again.

Terese Marie Mailhot
Essayist, author of Heart Berries: A Memoir, and teacher at Purdue University.

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed is a Two-Spirit bildungsroman. Whitehead gave me lines like, “My home is full of hope and ghosts,” and I knew exactly what he was talking about, and it made me choke up, because I understand the nostalgia about leaving home, or leaving the rez, while desiring white things — and a lifestyle that doesn’t exist, or falls dim compared to what we leave behind unresolved. Whitehead has a good eye. The narrative selects only a few details to give about a space, but they are the exact right details. There’s a lot of grace in the work as well. It’s dealing with heavy content but it’s not playing on anyone’s pathos, it’s simply exacting an experience we have to bear witness to. I like the humor. I like the fragmentation within the structure of the book — it never loses me. Whitehead is in full control and resisting reader expectations in terms of self-pity or shame. I love a voice that isn’t going to tiptoe into the most gutting, honest, or raw moments. I like a narrative that is unashamed, because writing with resistance isn’t easy — it’s actually quite hard to step into the world resisting.

Thomas Page McBee
Journalist and author of Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man and Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg (One World)

Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox is queer in every sense of the word. It takes a popular, even dusty, form—the historical novel—and so radically and inventively reimagines it, I found myself, thrillingly, led to question my most basic ideas about time, gender, the stories we tell, and who gets to tell them. Unbelievably, this is a first novel for Rosenberg, who happens to be both trans and an academic like his novel’s protagonist, Dr. Voth, who stumbles on a heretofore undiscovered 1724 text that outlines the swashbuckling adventures of the queer duo Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess. Confessions of the Fox is about authenticity, as Dr. Voth, in footnotes, attempts to uncover the manuscript’s “realness,” but it’s also a story about time’s collapse, and the histories we never get to read, and being a body born of constant reinvention. The book is smart, sexy, affecting, and joyous. Rosenberg has uncovered—no, tapped into—something very deep here. This fictional history of queerness is as “real” as the many stories we sense have never been told but, nevertheless, travel on, year after year, within us. Reading it felt revolutionary.

Elizabeth Rush
Author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and instructor of creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Extra Hidden Life, among the Days by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan University Press)

This past summer Brenda Hillman and I did an event at one of my favorite indies in the country, Point Reyes Books. The night before I was camped out on the coast. My tent pitched half a mile from the decomposing body of a juvenile blue whale; its spine severed from a propeller strike. I brought Brenda’s latest book to keep me company, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, and can think of no better traveling companion. Large-hearted and strangely idiosyncratic, this book is a record of a fiercely independent mind at work, in turns song-filled and surprising. Often I think of these lines from “Poem for a National Seashore”: “By the sea the orbweaver…was bolder than the country, / it didn’t see underlying leverage or hedging, / didn’t see…the probably 100 trillion traded on / what is called futures while the mountain lion that // has a small future took her young through the O in / October.” The poems in Extra Hidden Life, among the Days teach us how to navigate this tumultuous time by returning us to the places that matter most––and the alternative logics they propose––where mounting losses demand both elegy and electric political engagement, prayer and praise.

Michelle Tea
Author of 10 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the essay collection Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms. Curator of Amethyst Editions, a collaboration with the Feminist Press.

Invasions by Calvin Gimpelevich (Instar Books)

Fiction writer Calvin Gimpelevich’s debut short story collection, Invasions, landed at the end of 2018 so it’s got all of 2019 to blow up and blow your minds, as it did mine. Every story in the collections takes you into a landscape rarely if ever explored in fiction. Pieces set in consensus reality depict small but impactful dramas experienced by trans-spectrum characters: a gender non-conforming 22-year-old passes as a teenaged boy in a sexual relationship with a middle-aged woman; a trans man finds temporary community in the liminal space of a trans surgery center; working-class co-workers having DL sex find themselves trapped in a mountaintop blizzard with a straight, rich wedding party. But the stories that really gripped me are the pieces with a Black Mirror-esque bent: the masterful Rent, Don’t Own, which tracks a disabled dyke employed by a gym where workers inhabit your body and exercise on your behalf (it’s about a lot more than that, though); a gay man with supernatural abilities occupies the body of a fascist cop raiding a bathhouse in The Sweetness. The way queerness is centered in this collection is striking, mining the depth and variety of queer experience and fusing them with a brilliant imagination to create realities that feel familiar, inevitable and absolutely new. A serious must-read for 2019, ya’ll!

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A writer of fiction, author of the short story collection Friday Black.

Unearthings by Wendy Chen (Tavern Books)

There is a special pleasure in watching the suddenly epic: small shrimp in a pond becoming great dragon boats, then, as is the case in the incredible poem “They Sail Across a Mirrored Lake,” maybe the net that sweeps down to gather these shrimp becomes a constellation pulled from the sky. Wendy Chen is a master of this sort of alchemy; she makes epic life appear everywhere, especially in the dead or dying.

Her debut collection Unearthings has the feeling of something crafted exactly as it was meant to be. A syllable-level precision makes these pages radiate with a power that hums in your head long after you’ve set the book down. Here is a reminder of a great history that sweeps through our veins. Here is an appreciation for what is remembered, what is lost. Here is an epic lineage rendered into an essence so pure it shines and hurts and saves. Wendy Chen’s Unearthings does something to you as you move through its pages. She is a special poet with a raw and important power that is evidenced early and often in her debut. Read this book. Let it wash over you. You’ll be better for it.

* * *

Dear Reader,

“The Senate committee asked as many questions about the cane as they did about Brooks,” Jason Phillips writes regarding the aftermath of the famous incident in which Congressman Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. Questions such as,

“‘Do you know anything of the relative specific gravity of a gutta percha cane or of a hickory cane?’ ‘How thick was the cane used by Mr. Brooks?’ Witnesses who owned pieces of the cane brought them to the Senate investigation in their pockets. They asked the doctor who attended to Sumner if repeated blows to the head with a stick ‘from one half to five-eights of an inch in diameter’ could kill a man. ‘It would depend upon the character of the stick’ the doctor replied.”

This fixation on the character of the stick, on the parameters of what is possible with the stick, becomes a cipher for Phillips’ entire project in The Looming Civil War, which is to understand how people thought about the Civil War before it happened — as it turns out, their thoughts are often most legible through how they regarded material things.

In a review of Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, an autobiographical novel of Geissler’s time spent working at an Amazon warehouse, Rebecca McCarthy asks her own set of questions about things: “Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face? Who needs these pre-distressed Iron Maiden hats, already rags at point of purchase?” The answer, of course, is “Amazon customers, which is to say, all of us.” Or, as Geissler puts it, “It’s because of all the things that are here, which someone or another wants to buy, that you’re here in the first place.” Stare long into the shopping cart, and the shopping cart stares back into thee.

It bears remembering that Amazon started as a way to sell a lot of, and undercut the market for, books. “Everything exists, in case you were going to ask. Absolutely everything exists, and people can buy it all,” Geissler writes. But the ‘everything store’ started as a bookstore, and ‘everything exists’ sounds like something people would used to say about the limitless realities open to us when we read books, rather than about a bunch of actual stuff. It’s as though Amazon is the Borgesian library run amuck. Somehow, on his way to amassing an infinite collection of books in which everything possible is written — ultimately making it all unreadable and useless — Bezos ended up with an an infinite collection of junk in which every possible desire is rendered pathetically visible, making it all… well, I don’t know. Is a George Clooney mug useful? Can that desire ever be usefully satisfied? This, regrettably, seems to be the defining question of our time.

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The weight of the meaning of the things around us, of our material environment, becomes disturbingly apparent when reading Dorothy Butler’s Gilliam’s memoir Trailblazer. Butler Gilliam was hired as the first black woman journalist at The Washington Post, at a time when the city was inherently segregated; so racism manifested itself most obviously as the denial of access to things. Each deprivation would magnify the one that came before it, transforming everyday assignments into uncertain quests:

“My editors would assign me a story for the next day’s edition, and, like other reporters, I had only a few hours to get the story, return, and write it before deadline…. I would wave frantically for a taxicab, mostly driven by white men, but all would whiz past me…. When I eventually got to my assignment, I did my reporting, and I would again try to flag a cab to get back to the paper to type my story. As time passed, deadlines neared and no taxi stopped, I would start writing my stories out in my reporter’s notebook….”

And that was just the taxis! Many of the lunch places, the coworkers, and the subjects of her stories were racist, too. What a hellish job. “Many years later,” Butler Gilliam writes, “I discovered I had turned a lot of my anger inward in what became depression, and someone close to me at that time later told me, ‘you didn’t know how much bondage you were in at The Washington Post.’”

The ramifications of another type of material segregation are apparent in Rafia Zakaria’s review of The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch, Sanam Maher’s biography of the slain Pakistani YouTube star. “Qandeel was not my daughter but she was my son. She provided us financial and emotional support,” her father lamented after her death. He accused her brothers of killing her for her money, or perhaps more accurately over the money, which it was unusual and unseemly for a woman to have so much of — especially so much of it that she was the child supporting her parents. One of the brothers confessed to killing her for ‘honor,’ blaming, among other things, some sexy selfies she took with a cleric. But Zakaria knows the score: “A woman’s economic empowerment can be anything from an existential threat to an inconvenience, but in any case, men believe they are entitled to stop it by stopping her life.” What’s lost in the telling of the story of Qandeel Baloch, Zakaria is saying, is that she was killed for doing her job.

Overall, it’s obviously the bigots who are the problem, but there’s something about the jobs, too, that stinks: “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.”

So this month, I offer you a blessing that is only a blessing until it actually happens, like for the furloughed federal workers, in which case it becomes curse: as Geissler puts in, “May every day be a day when shifts are terminated, ideally right after they begin.”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

I spent a while thinking about what the theme of this month’s books newsletter ought to be. Should it be state censorship, like the kind experienced by both Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, and Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet Nobel Laureate? Or, should it be (apropos of nothing, of course) all the scammers that popped up this month in our books coverage, like … well, also like Diderot (defrauder of priests) and Sholokhov (plagiarist)? (For an account of Diderot’s youthful pastime of scamming priests, I’ll have to refer you to the book itself — sadly, our excerpt doesn’t cover that side of him.) Then I realized the theme couldn’t be more obvious if it was lying face down on my coffee table, propped open like that (and ruining the spine) in order to save my page — books! The books this month are all about books!

For instance, starting with our two bad boys Diderot and Sholokhov: As Andrew Curran tells it in his new biography The Art of Thinking Freely, Diderot, along with his Enlightenment pals, wrote/edited the massive multi-volume Encyclopédie as, basically, a prank on the theocratic regime they lived under; the encyclopedia format, especially the radical potential of — I kid you not — cross-references, allowed the authors to subtlety undermine notions of absolute and divine authority. Meanwhile, as you can read in Brian J. Boeck’s biography Stalin’s Scribe, Sholokhov wrote/plagiarized a massive multi-volume novel, And Quietly Flows the Don — a genuine masterpiece — that he couldn’t finish for years. The main problem, other than a lack of additional material to plagiarize, was that if he had finished the book during the Terror, and all the characters hadn’t convincingly turned into Communists by the end, then Stalin would certainly have killed him. So, better to wait it out.

A little closer to our own time, in a conversation with interviewer Adam Morgan about Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment in his own massive multi-volume endeavor, Marlon James points to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series as a book that “continues to rule his life.” Gormenghast, says James, taught him “how the fantastical grows up,” and paved a path forward for his latest project, a literary fantasy epic based in African mythologies and histories. David Treuer, in the prologue to his new history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, points to a book that “ruled his life” in a very different way: Treuer explains that his own book was conceived of as a “counternarrative” to Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When he read Brown’s book in college, Treuer says he had felt deep “dismay” at the fact that “Brown’s narrative relied on — and revived — the same old sad story of the ‘dead Indian’” (as in, spiritually and culturally dead, as well as having suffered through many massacres and tragedies) and invoked the squalor of the reservations. Treuer felt compelled to present an alternate narrative, “to communicate what it was that [he] loved” about his home and his history, to change what had so alienated him as a young Native reader of Brown’s book.

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On the other hand, when beginning work on her latest novel, Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli tells interviewer Lily Meyer that she didn’t have a book in mind with which hers could be set in conversation, or which had laid a path that hers could follow. So, being a self-described “documenter” — as opposed to a fabulist, who could sit down in a “vacuum” and invent — she needed to hunt for one:

I read tangentially, obliquely, not reading about the child refugee crisis or even the crisis in migration from Syria. I read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade. I read about orphan trains, ships during slavery, lots of historical documents, and just archive, archive, archive. Then I read a book called The Gates of Paradise, written by Jerzy Andrzejewski and translated by Sergio Pitol, and I thought, This is exactly it. This is the way in.

Luiselli describes the ephemeral euphoria of finding The Gates of Paradise, which was a kind of moment every reader knows well, the kind we’re always aching to hit on again — that realization that you’ve finally found the book you want to be reading:

It’s so hard to find a book that you absolutely want to read in that moment. I begin a lot of books and then realize, This is really not what I want to be reading. Not the atmosphere, not the tone, not the voice. I don’t want to be in this world. When you find one that is exactly what you want to be reading, it’s like a miracle of some sort.

Devi S. Laskar wrote her new novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, in dialogue with yet another type of book — neither one that has been haunting her since young adulthood, nor one recently discovered after a long search, but one that is irrevocably lost. Years ago, her finished novel disappeared when her home was raided by law enforcement and her laptop seized as evidence. Her new novel is born of Laskar’s efforts to come to terms with the grief of that bereavement, and move past it, finding new ways to carry the work forward:

I started writing this story back in 2004, and then I was relying heavily on my previous experiences as a reporter, trying to be factually accurate. By the time I returned to this story about a decade later, I had hard choices to make because of what had happened, how I’d lost most of my work [in the raid]. First I had to come to terms that I’d probably never see my laptop again. Once I got through that… I jettisoned a lot of the facts that I’d previously held dear. I took a lot of similar “beats” or inflection points in the story and I made them composite, basing them on several people’s experiences, not just my own. I am not the narrator.

The loss of the first draft changed the structure and perspective of the final work. It’s as if reality inside the books shifts with all our troubles and griefs here on the outside. It reminds me of Edward Gorey, and his protestations to a long-ago interviewer. As Bridey Heing writes in her review of Mark Dery’s new biography of Gorey, Born To Be Posthumous:

When questioned on whether or not his books are a reflection of reality or fantasy, Gorey responded, “No one ever lets me explain what I mean about the reality of my books! Everyone always thinks, ‘Isn’t that amusing that this is his idea of reality!’”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about pasts and futures, and how lineages stretch across time. Reviewer Thea Prieto writes about how Sophia Shalmiyev, in her memoir Mother Winter, constructs a pantheon of women artists to fill the void left by her mother’s absence, calling them “the motherless future, the auxiliary mothers future.” She needs these women, Prieto says, not only to fill a hole in the past, but to prepare her to become a mother in (and of) the future; they are not so much models of parenthood as they are models of the act of influencing.

Speaking to Zan Romanoff about her new fantasy novel The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie talks about how women artists have been so consistently and thoroughly erased from the canon that every new woman writer lacks a sense of “writer ancestors” and “feels like she’s starting over without any guides.” Leckie says she now tries to be conscientious of her writer ancestors; she considers it an act of dissent and criticizes the privilege inherent to “the anxiety of influence.”

Who was it who talked about the anxiety of influence, how you feel like you couldn’t be better than anyone else if you couldn’t be original? Well, there’s also the anxiety of not having any past … I think that whole ‘anxiety of influence’ thing is such a privileged way of thinking. ‘Oh poor me, I have to try so hard to be original because I have all of these supporting ancestors.’

In his review of two new books by economists who hope to ‘save’ capitalism with even more capitalism, reviewer Aaron Timms points out that capitalism’s future, if it has a viable one, will almost certainly require the same things it needed to survive in the past — a big dose of socialism and a huge effort of political will — rather than some of the more dystopian-sounding market solutions proposed by the economists. There is nothing wrong, Timms is saying, with turning to our ancestors for guidance.

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Sometimes, though, we have to adapt to new realities, and recognize that the future is going to be different than what we have come to anticipate based on what our forebears faced. Speaking with Laura Barcella about her new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America, Robin Marty says she thinks it’s extremely likely that Roe will be overturned soon, and that we need to prepare — but not in the ways we think. The danger of outlawed abortion in the future will not be one of health, or of life and death, as much as a carceral one. Women who have abortions outside of the increasingly narrow window allowed by the legal system will face arrest and imprisonment. The future could very likely be one in which people who have abortions become political prisoners, and that unimaginable world is the one we need to prepare for. (Of course, the future is already here for the many women who have been sent to jail for self-inducing abortions because they lacked access to care.)

In her review of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, Ankita Chakraborty writes that the past is something bloody and dangerous that Erpenbeck’s characters try to protect each other from, but this desire to protect transforms into an act of harm when we refuse to listen to refugees’ stories, to the history of the violence perpetrated against them. Erpenbeck’s main character engages in acts of radical listening, because he seeks out stories that his government would rather he didn’t hear. In his book Notes on a Shipwreck about how his home island of Lampedusa is at the epicenter of refugee arrivals — and refugee deaths — Davide Enia writes that “History is sending people ahead, in flesh and blood, people of every age.” Listening to those refugees’ stories, writes Chakraborty, is every citizen’s obligation. Listening to other people’s difficult histories is sometimes the most important thing we can do for the future.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

PS: Listen to Tori Telfer and me talk about all the wacky books of Ripperology she read to get to the bottom of whether Jack the Ripper could have been a woman.

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is about seeing the big picture. It’s about that moment when you glance around a corner to figure out what you’re missing, and how sometimes you don’t like what you find.

“Try to see, Leonel had said. It was what he was always asking me to do,” activist-poet Carolyn Forché writes in her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. “Try to see. Look at the world, he’d say, and not at the mirror.” Instead of looking at a mirror, Forché became one. As Melissa Batchelor Warnke points out in her review, Forché’s memoir is barely about Forché herself: it’s a record of what she saw and heard in El Salvador — the atrocities, the brewing war, and the resistance; it’s about her mysterious mentor and guide, Leonel; and, most importantly, it’s a facsimile of the conditions, the mood, the tense aura of censorship under which she saw and heard these things. Forché bears witness not just to the facts but to the feeling of living under dictatorship.

“When you are in a very controlling religion like this, one of the ways that they keep people inside is by painting the world outside as a very scary place,” Amber Scorah tells Jacqueline Alnes in an interview about her memoir Leaving the Witness. For Scorah, leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses was simply a matter of not being able to pretend she believed anymore. When she looked in the mirror, she saw someone she didn’t recognize: “When you’re indoctrinated, your true self is secondary to the persona that you have to adopt to exist in the world in which you live.” Living as that second person became unbearable. She could not unsee herself.

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In Eve Ewing’s book of poetry, 1919, she attempts to see clearly events that happened very close to her in space, but far away in time: Chicago’s Red Summer “riots,” when whites terrorized blacks across the city. In an interview with Adam Morgan, she says, “I think of the people in this book as our neighbors, right? They happen to be our neighbors across the span of a century, but they’re our neighbors. They’re our fellow Chicagoans.” Ewing relates that she was consistently surprised by the fact that she did not already know the things that she was learning. “It shows how compressed history really is.”

Darcey Steinke was similarly motivated to write her new memoir, Flash Count Diary, by the idea that there was a fuller story that she had not been told. In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe, Steinke says that, once her menopause symptoms hit and she tried to educate herself about the process, she found that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but when they accept hormones, they say all their menopausal symptoms go away, so then the journey through menopause kind of stops. … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.” Steinke had to write a book of her own just to find out what the natural process is like.

While writing a review of two recent books about, respectively, Jewish history in Canada and the history of antisemitic conspiracy theories, Jordan Michael Smith had a revelation about his past. In his youth, when his family lived in the exurbs of Toronto, he wanted to — and did — become friends with classmates who bullied him with antisemitic slurs. “One of the awful things about oppression is that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to hate your oppressors. You want them to like you too badly.” He had forgotten all about it — “It was strategic forgetfulness, acting like I remembered less than I did. It was more convenient that way, for them and me.” — and had likewise forgotten that he himself had also once bullied a fellow student with a racial slur, a horrifying revelation. “A few years later, the kid we bullied and I became friends, too. I wonder if he forgave me, or just strategically forgot about what I’d done.”

It’s always a good idea to remember the things you’d rather forget, to see the things you’d rather not see. As Ewing puts it, “These kinds of violent histories are all around us… We have to take the time to stop and seek them out…”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

Take a listen to my recent conversation with Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, about what she’s been reading — the first in a series of talks I’ll be having with authors about what books they’re into lately!

Elizabeth is currently serving as the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artist and Writer, and just a few weeks before we spoke, she returned from a 55-day scientific cruise to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. We spoke about polar adventures, ice, motherhood; how specific narrative structures and expectations can become attached to certain places over time; and how looking to different written forms, like poetry, can help us see beyond those narrative restrictions when telling important new stories, like the story of the climate crisis. Below is a list of all the books that Elizabeth brought up during our conversation.

Ernest Shackleton, South
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Sur,” collected in The Real and the Unreal
Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Angela Garbes, Like a Mother
Meaghan O’Connell, And Now We Have Everything (Read an excerpt on Longreads)
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Craig Childs, Virga & Bone
Sarah Wheeler, Terra Incognita

Happy reading!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

I’m reading this book right now called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa; it was written in French during the Napoleonic Wars by a Pole named Jan Potocki. It’s a recursive story-within-a-story sort of thing, and it’s giving me nightmares. The stories are all subtly related; that’s kind of the source of the horror. Well, ok, no, not exactly: the actual source of the horror is that every time a new stranger tells him a story (which seems to happen to him a lot), the narrator of the “frame story” wakes up the next morning under a gallows in the embrace of two corpses! But also horrifying is that in each of the unrelated stories that this main narrator is being told by strangers, there is always a duo, a set of two people — sometimes the storytellers themselves are a duo — who seem to be eerily connected to the two corpses. Nothing ever tells you outright they’re connected; it’s just that they’re always introduced the same way, in pairs. So you start to get the feeling that it’s the same pair every time.

I bring this up because it reminds me a little bit of writing the books newsletter. Not the waking up in the embrace of corpses under a gallows part. (Not yet.) But being told a bunch of unrelated stories by strangers, then seeing a thread of connection? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Especially this week, when the connections I can see are as thin as ghosts — recursion and repetition and doubling — things coming in twos. In an interview with Tobias Carroll about her new collection Screen Tests, Kate Zambreno talks about reading the same books over and over again, and how it has led her into a “ghostly correspondence” with long-gone writers and artists. Connected to this somehow, in my mind, is a startling point made by Will Meyer in his review of Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic, which is that everything terrible about the beef industry that Specht shows happened in the American West in the past — the dispossession and genocide of Native people in order to expand ranching — is happening again, right now, in Brazil. Or, maybe not again — maybe it’s always been happening, in one big beefy outward expansion? When the cowboys and saloons of the American West can be found in the Amazon in 2019, it’s also a kind of ghostly correspondence, is what I think I’m trying to get at.

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In an essay from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World, he too is thinking about how the present is just one more layer of the past. “We build on top of ourselves,” he thinks while on a trip to an archaeological site in Vienna. “We live on top of the dead I thought while staring down into the ruins there snapping photos of the ancient culture’s bones on my phone so I could remember them some day in the future.” He also, like an archaeological dig or The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, tells many unrelated stories at once, and seems to wait with just as much curiosity as the reader to see how it’s all going to shake out:

Everything we do today comes at the expense of the future. That can be little things like how last night I basically ate an entire loaf of bread. You know the kind that sticks out of your shopping bag and you go like haha look at me I’m a French guy over here ayy forgetaboutit. Or it can be taking pleasure or comfort in all the things you know you shouldn’t do but nonetheless feel good right now in this moment and tomorrow is not your problem. Someone else is going to have to deal with it and even if that person is actually you it’s still you tomorrow and you don’t know that guy so let him figure it out.

It was about two years ago and there was a sadness inside of me I had been hoping to run away from and by chance an alcohol company offered to send me to Europe to go drink their specific type of alcohol there so I went and did that. Turns out though that for better or worse and no matter what this dude Marcus Aurelius might have said to the contrary sadness travels well across borders. Unlike hand lotion you can smuggle grief onto the plane and no one will know it. Pain doesn’t show up on the x-ray scanner at all it’s the perfect crime.

It is a very pretty piece of writing. I’ve been lucky to excerpt two (two!) exceptionally beautifully written books this past month; the other is Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, in which she takes an interesting tack. Instead of noticing recursion and repetition in the past, she seeks out continuity; and where she can’t see continuity, she invents it. Hartman sifts through the archives for whatever records she can find that indicate how black young women and girls lived in the second and third generations after slavery. She wants to understand how they lived free, how they invented what living free looked and felt like. But there is very little in the record, and most of what’s there is carceral: punitive records created by social workers and police. So Hartman turns the lack of recorded history on its head; instead of the repetition of thousands of erased black women and girls, she sees one young girl’s life playing out in the archive — Hartman sees this girl peaking out of a window in one photograph, sees her hurrying past on the street with her eyes averted in another.

Fragments of her life are woven with the stories of girls resembling her and girls nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment…

The names and the stories rush together. The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city.

By seeing continuity instead of repetition, Hartman creates a narrative that is powerful rather than weak, glorious even if it is tragic.

The only thing I knew for sure was that she did have a name and a life that exceeded the frame in which she was captured… Anonymity enables her to stand in for all the others. The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers to bear.

Time is “too precious to be passed telling stories,” one of the mysterious duos tells the narrator of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Then the rest of the book, of course, is spent doing nothing else. Enjoy your reading!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Dear Reader,

“I had to write this book. I think any writer that finishes a book would say the same thing: they didn’t have a choice,” says Mark Haber to Adam Morgan in an interview about his slim novella Reinhardt’s Garden. Steph Cha, in her interview with Victoria Namkung, likewise talks about a compulsion to write, though not regarding her latest novel, Your House Will Pay, but rather her prolific output of Yelp reviews:

First and foremost, it is just a compulsion. I actually have a lot of these stupid compulsions. It’s like a completeness thing. I basically started writing Yelp reviews in 2009, and because of the way Yelp works, I feel like I have to do it until I die. I think now it probably doesn’t help with the book writing, but I do think writing Yelp reviews helped me figure out my voice in a way that blogging helps people figure out their voices because I’ve written millions of words on Yelp and I started around the same time as my first novel. It’s a low pressure, low stakes way for me to be writing almost every day.

In his review of Lafcadio Hearn’s newly reissued short story collection Japanese Ghost Stories, Colin Dickey writes about Hearn’s lifelong obsession with the supernatural, which began in childhood:

Alone at night in his bedroom he would become convinced ghosts were reaching out for him in the dark. He would scream ferociously until an adult would come to check on him, a disturbance that inevitably resulted in being whipped. But, as Hearn would later recall, “the fear of ghosts was greater than the fear of whippings — because I could see the ghosts.”

This obsession dictated the course of his writing career. As Dickey tells it, Hearn’s ghost stories are of a piece with his journalism in the U.S. and Martinique before his late-life move to Japan — “stories of murder and mayhem” and “interviews with undertakers and butchers.”  Taken as a whole, his full body of work is “a corpus around that thin line between life and death.”

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The compulsion to a narrative can be dangerous — it can twist the teller to conform to unexpected contours. In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe about her book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession, Cameron Dezen Hamon says that she was drawn powerfully toward religion from an early age:

It felt like there was a missing piece, not just in my spirit, but in my community. I was always drawn to the mystery, drawn to spirituality. I wish I had a better word for it. I was trying to hypnotize my friends when I was nine and was always talking about ghosts. I felt this thing within me that was different from other people and it sought community, it sought to be around like-minded people. It felt like this question mark, that was driving me toward an answer.

But in adult life, within her chosen spiritual home, she realized that something was still missing — something different but still vital. Her church’s sexism, it’s denial of the part of her that was female, left her fractured in a new way:

I began to see that also my voice was being used. I thought all of me was needed for this goal of bringing God’s kingdom to Earth. That’s the evangelical goal, right? That’s what we say broadly, in that community. But it was really that I was being used in slivers and slices, and I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table.

Dezen Hammon’s memoir becomes a means for her to reconstruct herself:

I started to put myself piece by piece back together with writing. I started writing again in earnest in my late thirties and realized that the person I had left behind at twenty-seven was someone worth reclaiming. So I’m in a new golden era, where my voice and my body and my spirit, there’s no compromise going on here. I’m not tamping down parts of myself that are inconvenient.

The kind of narrative power, to deconstruct or reconstruct the teller of the tale, is something Dickey touches on when discussing Hearn. Trying to pinpoint the specific quality of Hearn’s ghost stories that make them so ineffable, Dickey writes that

What gives Hearn’s yūrei their strange aura, their sense of discomfort is his own uncertainty about the stories he’s telling. In Hearn’s tales, the eerie landscape is the voice of the storyteller itself — it moves under its own power, guided by some unknown and unseen motivation.

Indulging in his lifelong obsession with the divide between life and death, Hearn the narrator reaches a sort of sublime state of powerless, adrift in realms of fear beyond the point of his understanding: the book as immersion therapy.

Speaking to Hope Reese about her new memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado describes how the story she tells in her book, that of the domestic abuse she survived at the hands of her partner, also has a certain power over the teller inherent in it. During the abusive relationship, Machado’s potential ability to tell the story was itself an avenue of her partner’s abuse: she would instruct Machado not to write about certain incidents.

She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of exposure. Of the narrative that I possess.

By telling the story, Machado is breaking free of it: the book as an escape tool.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

Books of friendships & feuds.

Yuval Taylor’s Zora & Langston is a lavishly detailed account of the friendship, literary collaboration, and epic falling out of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; Dylan Jones’ Wichita Lineman tells the parallel life stories of Jim Webb and Glen Campbell in the years after they came together to create the enigmatic eponymous song; and Andrew Curran’s Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely chronicles Diderot’s intellectual sparring with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great.

Books of conspiracies, coincidences, & cover-ups.

Tim O’Neill’s Chaos lays out the evidence he collected during his 20-year investigation of the Manson family murders; Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies takes a tour of some of the major conspiracy theories haunting the American psyche today; Evan Ratliff’s Mastermind pieces together a vast criminal network that is astonishingly controlled by just one man; Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival examines the extent to which the aftereffects of Chernobyl were covered up by world governments; Brian J. Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe  hypothesizes that one of Russia’s most beloved classic novels was plagiarized; and Erik Davis’ High Weirdness is a study of the symbolic “synchronicities” that seem to have recurred during three famous psychedelic experiences of the 1970s.

Books about family.

The bonds of family bend and break across vast distances in Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Patsy; Mira Jacobs’ graphic memoir Good Talk meditates on mothering in a mixed-race family in America; Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers and T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls are memoirs that celebrate family while also reckoning with legacies of neglect and abuse; and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is a 100-year history of her family’s New Orleans home, which was lost during Hurricane Katrina.

Books of investigations & revelations.

Nicole Weisensee Egan’s Chasing Cosby details how the case against Bill Cosby unfolded and why the story took so long to gain traction in the media; Arthur Holland Michel’s Eyes in the Sky reveals that drone surveillance has become widespread in American cities without much public awareness; Ronnie Citron-Fink’s True Roots investigates the real cost of hair dye to humans and the environment; Reniqua Allen’s It Was All a Dream chronicles black millennials’ experiences of income and racial inequality in the 21st century, and explores how this black generation is persevering in transformative new ways; Emily Bazelon’s Charged explores how the power of prosecutors has grown out of control in many American cities; and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women provides an almost painfully intimate window into the romantic lives of three women who have recently been deeply, obsessively in love with a man.

Frightening books for your fearless friends.

Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is a nailbiting novella of iron-age reenactors and parental abuse; Japanese Ghost Stories is a reissue of Lafcadio Hearn’s foundational collection of ghastly tales; and Mona Awad’s Bunny is a delightfully terrifying novel of sex, magic, and MFAs.

Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments reconstructs the free and experimental lives that black young women and girls were living in the second and third generations born after slavery; Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs revises what the role of the suburb has been in American history, showing that they were sometimes havens for radicals; Robert MacFarlane’s Underland investigates the human underground world, revealing us to be a surprisingly subterranean species; Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide an Empire rewrites the history of the United States from the perspective of its imperial territories; Amir Alexander’s Proof! argues that the discovery of Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced social and political thought; and David Teuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee tells the history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, reclaiming Native history after the point of its so-called demise.

Compulsively readable fiction.

Bryan Washington’s Lot, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, is a collection of interlocking short stories named after cities and streets in Houston; Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is a too-real satire of the world after Trump’s coming apocalypse; Mary HK Choi’s Permanent Record explores how modern lives and romances are mediated by technology; Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is a collection of interlocking short stories set in Denver, and in each one a woman has suffered violence at the hands of a man; Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is a straightforward story of teenage romance that becomes more complicated with every twist of the narrative; and Téa Obreht’s Inland is a sprawling Western based on the true story of the U.S. Camel Corps.

Essays & Criticism.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, showcases the craftsmanship of contemporary Native storytelling; Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World is a vital and despairing collection of essays on modern American life; T Fleischmann’s Time Is a Thing the Body Moves Through uses the artworks of Felix Gonzáles-Torres to reflect on how the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art; Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing is a manifesto that calls for a radical winding down the attention economy; Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain is a love letter to A Tribe Called Quest; and Jess Row’s White Flights is a literary dissection of whiteness in literature.

Minds & bodies.

Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying reconstructs her experience of living with Bipolar II; Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary is a philosophical meditation on menopause; Anne Boyer’s The Undying is a lyrical manifesto against the cancer industrial complex; Keah Brown’s The Pretty One is a lighthearted collection of personal essays that challenge the idea the idea that disability precludes self-love, romance, and happiness; Cameron Dezen Hammon’s memoir This Is My Body reflects on the painful contradictions of harboring deep Evangelical faith in a female body; and Andrea J. Buchanan’s The Beginning of Everything is a memoir of her marriage and mind falling apart.

Extraordinary memoirs.

Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See the World Again was clandestinely written in the Turkish prison where he is being held as a political dissident; Marc Hamer’s How To Catch a Mole chronicles his rediscovery of the lost art of molecatching; Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the inventively told tale of how she survived domestic abuse at the hands of her partner; Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True is the story of her experiences in El Salvador as during the civil war, which she famously recorded at the time in verse; Delphine Minou’s I’m Writing You From Tehran is her account of falling in love with the city from which her family had fled; and Matt and Ted Lee’s Hot Box is a whirlwind look at the fast-paced world of high-end catering in New York City.

Book about just one thing.

Semicolons, wind, and beef.

Happy Holidays!

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