Notes from the book closet on new titles that caught our eye.
“On Hinduism” (Oxford University Press), by Wendy Doniger, out March 3rd. For more than a decade, Doniger’s scholarship has been under attack by conservative Hindu groups who feel that her work misrepresents and insults their religion; last month, her eight-hundred-page book “The Hindus: An Alternative History” was pulled from bookstores in India. (Read Jonathan Shainin on Doniger and censorship.) Her latest book, “On Hinduism,” which is in its second printing in India, is a collection of essays and lectures addressing contemporary and historic debates surrounding the religion, from the ethical implications of Hindu cosmologies to gender inversions in the Kama Sutra. Dinanath Batra, the man who filed the suit against “The Hindus,” has said that he intends to take aim at “On Hinduism” next.—R.A.
“All Our Names” (Knopf), by Dinaw Mengestu, out March 4th. Mingestu is a MacArthur “genius” grant winner who appeared in The New Yorker’s 2010 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. His new novel (an excerpt of which was published in the magazine earlier this year) is told in the alternating voices of two narrators. The first is a young man in Africa, who leaves his village to go to Kampala, Uganda. He aspires to be a revolutionary and a writer but can only afford to hang around the university campus. There he meets the charismatic Isaac, who is in the same situation. “I was a victim to his maneuvers from the beginning, instantly folded into his reality, which, for the first time since I came to the capital, gave the feeling there was at least one place I belonged,” the first narrator says. The second narrator is a young woman named Helen, a social worker in a small Midwestern college town, whose story takes place several years later. She is assigned to the case of a newly arrived African immigrant, also named Isaac, and the two soon fall in love, despite the deep stigma against their relationship. The stories of the narrators and the Issacs intertwine as Mengestu explores the perils of love, identity, and memory for the person living in exile.—A.D.
“The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age” (Twelve), by Myra MacPherson, out March 4th. The biography of Victoria Woodhull (née Claflin) and Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin, reads like a list of feminist firsts and ahead-of-their-time social provocations. Both women were wildly popular lecturers, drawing thousands to their speeches about women’s rights, racial equality, and free love; together, they became the first female stockbrokers (the next one wouldn’t come along for another century); Tennie was the second woman to run for Congress and Victoria was the first to run for President, and Frederick Douglass was her running mate. They were also famous for their beauty and infamous for their many lovers. But the sisters weren’t born into glamour: they grew up poor, the daughters of a small-time con man. MacPherson writes, “No one could have predicted any life for the sisters except prostitution, domestic servitude, or marriage to drunken wife beaters, trailed by a passel of children. They had no education or social position to pursue anything else.” “The Scarlet Sisters” is a lively account of the unlikely lives of “the two most symbiotic and scandalous sisters in American history.”—A.D.
“Clever Girl: A Novel” (Harper), by Tessa Hadley, out March 4th. Like many of Hadley’s characters, Stella, the protagonist of her new novel, comes from Britain’s striving, fragile lower middle class. A bookish, “clever” girl, Stella—born in 1956 and raised by a tough single mother in Bristol—earns a scholarship to a girls’ high school, but her path to university is derailed when she becomes pregnant; from there, she struggles with ordinary life, with accidents, and with tragedies. (Three chapters first appeared in the magazine as the short stories “Honor,” “Clever Girl,” and “Valentine.”)—R.A.
“Charlie Chaplin, Director” (Northwestern University Press), by Donna Kornhaber, out March 5th. “I think I’m a better director than an actor, ” Charlie Chaplin told Life magazine, in 1967. Most film critics and scholars disagreed. As a director, Chaplin has been called “inadequate” and of “very modest competence”; his filmmaking efforts are, at best, considered a vehicle for his fine performances. In her new book, Kornhaber, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, seeks to rehabilitate Chaplin’s reputation as a director, arguing that his style represented a innovative break with classical moviemaking. Kornhaber locates a “Chaplinesque” visual approach that was “purposeful, intelligible, and rich,” arguing that Chaplin was “deeply committed to exploring film as a consummate medium of expression, to challenging accepted cinematic orthodoxies, and to questioning what it means to make a film.”—R.A.
“Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People” (Hill and Wang), by Elizabeth A. Fenn, out March 11th. Fenn became interested in the Mandan people—a Native American tribe from the upper-Mississippi region—while doing research for her 2002 book, “Pox Americana,” about the eighteenth-century smallpox epidemic, which transformed the demographics of the American continent. The Mandan were once a large and thriving nation; Lewis and Clark spent a winter with them, in 1804. Fenn began to research the tribe, whose population dropped from twelve thousand to around three hundred. “The accounts I read,” she writes, “confirmed my suspicion that significant holes persisted in our knowledge of early America.” Faced with a “daunting” lack of historical material, Fenn turned to “archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science—any area of research that could give renewed substance to the Mandan past. The result is a mosaic I have pieced together out of stones from many quarries.” One of these quarries is the time the author has spent in North Dakota, visiting the small but stalwart community of Mandan who keep the tribe’s legacy alive.—A.D.
“From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town” (Harvard University Press), by Ingrid D. Rowland, out March 17th. Visitors to Pompeii have long marvelled at the town’s perfectly preserved scenes of Roman life, but interpretations of those scenes have varied widely over the years. Rowland writes about a selection of those visitors, some famous—like Renoir, whose painting style was influenced by the town’s erotic frescoes—others less well known—like a priest named Father Kircher, who risked the wrath of the Inquisition when he suggested that the eruption of Vesuvius was “in response to gigantic cycles within the earth itself rather than God’s pique at individual sinners.” Each story speaks to the way in which Pompeii reveals the hopes and the desires of the individuals and of societies.—A.D.
“Every Day Is for the Thief” (Random House), by Teju Cole, out March 25th. This short novel tells the story of a young Nigerian man living in New York City, who returns home, to Lagos, for a visit. The book is a series of episodes and encounters that provoke longings and revulsions as the man (who shares some biographical details with the author) comes to terms with changes in his home and in himself. The story’s rich imagery and sharp prose recall Cole's acclaimed 2012 novel, “Open City.” “Every Day Is for the Thief” was first published in Nigeria, in 2007, where it was widely praised as one of the best fictional depictions of Africa in recent memory. This is its first international publication.—A.D.
“Sleep Donation” (Atavist Books), by Karen Russell, out March 25th. Russell’s new novella is the first title from Atavist Books, a digital publisher launched in partnership with the media company of the same name. (Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, is a cofounder of the Atavist.) It tells the story of a lethal insomnia epidemic that has swept America, creating a social and medical crisis that is being battled through new bureaucratic infrastructure.(“It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.”) The narrator works for the powerful and mysterious Slumber Corps, an organization that recruits healthy citizens to donate their sleep to victims. She has lost her sister to the nightmarish disorder. “She died awake, after twenty days, eleven hours, and fourteen minutes without sleep. Locked flightlessly inside her skull.” (Chip Kidd designed the e-book’s interactive cover.)—R.A.
“How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons (Henry Holt and Co.),” By Bob Mankoff, out March 25th. Bob Mankoff, the Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker, is both a cartoonist and, in his words, a “cartoonologist”: his book recounts his path from loudmouth Bronx kid to psychology grad student to career cartoonist, but it is also an exploration of the art and science of humor. Mankoff provides a brief history of cartooning, deconstructs New Yorker cartoons, celebrates the generation of young cartoonists that the magazine has cultivated during his tenure, and draws on his background in psychology to investigate what makes funny things funny. (Some of his analysis first appeared as entries on his blog.) He writes that there is “a sweet spot for the use of humor in explaining humor, and cartoons are often the spot-on way to hit it.”—R.A.
