What is it about new ideas that elicits extreme responses? In her discussion about the advent of artificial intelligence, featured author Nina Begǔs reminds us that “radical technologies have always evoked radical reactions.”
This issue’s books differ widely in subject matter and methodology, yet they all expose the pitfalls of resorting to extremes. From a cultural examination of spiders to a memoir confronting the paradigms of deafness, these books offer narratives that seek nuance and accountability.
While pendulums will continue to swing, and upheavals agitate, the future is not only found in the immediate revolution but in the smaller daily motions—and in how we learn to discuss, govern, and study the radical ideas that shape our world.
Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History by Linford D. Fisher, Th.D. ’08 (Liveright, $39.99)
Through primary sources and data, Stealing America exposes a suppressed chapter in the history of slavery and its ramifications: from 1492 to 1880, an estimated three to six million Indigenous people from the lands stretching from Brazil to Canada were enslaved, 600,000 of them from what would become the United States. Untold numbers were stolen from communities by other means, such as boarding schools and land seizures during wars. This extensive research stems from a database project at Brown University, undertaken with tribal collaboration, for which Fisher serves as the principal investigator.
Riding into History: The Surprising Story of Sarah Keys Evans and the Fight to Desegregate Bus Travel by Amy Nathan ’67, M.A.T. ’68 (Duke, $29.95 paperback)
On a hot summer night in 1952—three years before Rosa Parks made history for challenging segregation on a city bus—Sarah Keys, a Black member of the Women’s Army Corps, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a bus traveling from New Jersey to North Carolina. She was arrested, jailed, and fined. Drawing on years of interviews with Keys, Nathan recounts the case as both biography and legal history, illuminating an understudied chapter of the civil rights movement. Keys’s landmark 1955 victory closed a loophole that bus companies had long used to maintain segregation in interstate travel.
Arachnomania: Spiders and the Cultural Work They Do for Us by Maria Tatar (Princeton, $24.95)
Spiders weave strange and wondrous webs all around us, and yet, according to Tatar, Loeb research professor of folklore and mythology and Germanic languages and literatures emerita, they have remained in the shadows far too long. From Shelob in The Lord of the Rings and Aragog in the Harry Potter series to the spider god Anansi of West African mythology and Darwin’s “little aeronauts,” spiders—equal parts horror and beauty—colonize this indulgently fun cultural study bridging nature, literature, folklore, and art.
The Flag Was Still There: A History of the American Experiment in Five Anniversaries by David McKean ’79 and M. Todd Bennett (Hachette, $32)
Celebrating jubilees may have fallen out of fashion, but in The Flag Was Still There, these anniversaries provide an opportunity for examining the progresses and failures of the American experiment every 50 years. As we look to the 250th anniversary of the United States, McKean and Bennett—who both have ties to the U.S. Department of State—revisit the inflection points of 1776, 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976, reminding us just how fractured the nation can become, but also how it has been able to emerge from the pits of division.
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau ’03 (Duke, $27.95 paperback)
Long before his internet-breaking Super Bowl halftime show, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—aka Bad Bunny—propelled plena, a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican genre, onto the global charts and became the first Spanish-language artist with more than 100 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. In P FKN R (a title borrowed from his popular anthem to Puerto Rico), Rivera-Rideau and Díaz place Ocasio’s activism—from cancelling lucrative tours as a form of protest to infusing his work with references to Puerto Rican independence—in a long history of Puerto Rican resistance.
Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice by Rachel Kolb (Ecco, $29.99)
In this engaging memoir, Rachel Kolb, a deaf writer and former Harvard Junior Fellow, navigates language in the deaf and hearing worlds. From the mechanics of forming the “R” sound with her mouth and her views on oralism—the emphasis on oral language through lip-reading and speech in the education of the deaf community—to the trope of overcoming disability, the mythos of Helen Keller, and the vulnerability of entrusting one’s words to an interpreter to voice, Articulate skillfully intertwines the intimate with the ideological, the personal with the universal.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Ph.D. ’10 (Simon & Schuster, $30)
How does an author capture the layers of an artist at the height of their creative output? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s success redefining musical storytelling and his mainstream popularity make this task all the more challenging. Pollack-Pelzner’s narrative aims to debunk the myth of the innate creative genius, drawing on extensive interviews to explore Miranda’s unlikely path. It’s not surprising that this study veers ever-so-slightly hagiographic at times, given the sentimentality and exuberant energy that inhabits Miranda’s work. And for this, Hamilton fans and the children singing along to Disney’s “Encanto” are thankful.
Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI by Nina Begǔs, Ph.D. ’20 (University of Michigan, $24.95 paperback)
Can the humanities and AI go hand in hand—and have they been doing so longer than we imagined? From George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle (popularized by My Fair Lady stage and film adaptations) to the 1960s chatbot ELIZA, Begǔs examines the Pygmalion myth and humanlike representations of AI as portrayed in literature and film. Along the way, she presents an ambitious conceptual framework she calls “artificial humanities,” in which the humanities inform AI technologies, perhaps to the betterment of both.
Nothing on Earth by Ian MacKenzie ’04 (Unnamed Press, $35)
A spy and a mother—one and the same yet ever at odds—is the star of this existentialist espionage thriller in the vein of le Carré. Anna, a former counterterrorism specialist, becomes absorbed in an international investigation into a mysterious metal with possible otherworldly origins. The search unfolds against a real-life backdrop of coups, civil unrest, and the global pandemic. Its emotional core—the tension between Anna’s career and motherhood—resonates, even if most readers’ jobs involve fewer secrets and lower stakes.
Whiplash: From the Battle for Obama-care to the War on Science by David Blumenthal ’70, M.D. ’74, M.P.P. ’75 and James A. Morone (Yale, $30)
In the battle to expand healthcare access in the United States, successes lay the groundwork for failures, and each triumph sows seeds of division. Morone and Blumenthal, a professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, tell the story of three presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—who pushed healthcare to the center of partisan politics and national identity. Culture wars, class dynamics, and the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic coalesce in this perfectly titled account of the changing relationship between the presidency and public health.
Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology by Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, M.T.S. ’07 (Notre Dame, $35)
This deep dive follows Henry David Thoreau on an unexpected theological path. Lydia Willsky-Ciollo argues that he developed his own “theology of wildness,” exploring relation- ships among humans, nature, and the divine. Acknowledging Thoreau’s well-documented skepticism of organized religion, she describes how his beliefs differed from broader transcendentalist thought. Whether or not readers subscribe to this argument, Wildness offers many an insight and close read for the dedicated Thoreauvian.
