In the opening lines of “Yes to Everything,” the final essay of Anne Fadiman’s new collection, an established author speaks at a college assembly. Said author, in his learned wisdom, proceeds to tell the crowd of aspiring writers that the odds of making it as a writer are not in their favor. The upshot: don’t bother.
A soon-to-be student of Fadiman’s calls his bluff during the Q&A. And she was right: a host of authors, veteran and new, are still endeavoring to create or express something fresh, as in the inventive and insightful works described here. Vampires visit Harvard. “Machiavellian” takes on a more nuanced meaning. Presidential agency in wars both at home and abroad undergoes a reckoning. State-authorized memories are examined in Rwanda, and origin stories of identity are reimagined in Europe, China, Cuba, and even Vermont—where a poet, rather than a biographer, distills a political revolution into the story of one man’s life.
Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker ’90 (W.W. Norton, $39.99)
What does it take to lead a divided nation? Here, it’s not the folksy idealism of “Honest Abe” but a skillful political strategist and behind-the-scenes party organizer who gets results. Pinsker puts Lincoln’s knack for coalition-building and rare ability to shift among political parties—Whig, Republican, Unionist—on display. Lincoln’s government was not the Tammany Hall evoked by the title, but his confidential writings show how a certain “boss” energy can help a president wield power to keep a nation intact—or destabilize it.
The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars by Dov Fox ’04 (Harvard, $45)
To treat or not to treat? Can clinicians act on their convictions when it comes to services like abortion, gender-affirming care, and pain management? The post-Roe era reveals a longstanding yet deeply precarious compromise between law and medicine and a fundamental disparity in practice. This compromise safeguards conscientious refusers without offering those same legal protections for clinicians who feel morally obligated to provide evidence-based care for contested services. Fox, a legal and bioethics expert, offers a framework for correcting this “conscience asymmetry,” but it requires disentangling ethical care from culture wars.
The Last Vampire by Romina Garber ’06 (Wednesday Books, $21)
A moody New Hampshire boarding school. A Jane Austen-obsessed heroine. A brooding vampire with a backstory that includes a blissful year at Harvard before eternal damnation (interpret as you will). Enter The Last Vampire, an engaging gothic teen romance for the older-to-perennial YA crowd and longtime fans of Garber’s Zodiac series (written under the pen name Romina Russell).
Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex by Benjamin Wilson (Harvard, $49.95)
When it comes to the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, Wilson, an associate professor of the history of science, reminds us there are no heroes. This ambitious history examines the origins of nuclear strategic stability (which includes the concept of mutually assured destruction) and those who benefited from it. Using declassified documents and financial paper trails, Wilson unravels the trope of the elite, independent scientist transcending self-interest for the good of the nation—and humanity—revealing instead a strengthened military industrial complex. (Cue debates about scientific exceptionalism and government-funded research.)
Islamic China: An Asian History by Rian Thum, Ph.D. ’10 (Harvard, $39.95)
Religion, geography, and self-perception intersect in this exploration of an obscured history. Through rare source material dating from circa 1640 to 1920, Thum weaves together interconnected stories of diverse communities that make the Muslims of China, he writes, “unsurprising, even ordinary.” In the process, he challenges persistent assumptions about both China and Islam, their perceived incompatibility, and our notions of what an origin story looks like.
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx ’01 (Viking, $32)
We begin with the cautionary tale of Lollapalooza: what was once an alternative music festival at the heart of an American teen subculture is now a mega-branded cash grab featuring pop superstars and a DJ-ing Goldman Sachs CEO. This is a symptom of what Marx calls a “larger illness”: the stagnation of cultural invention thanks to increasingly blurred lines separating profits, politics, and art. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, Blank Space could have veered into a generational rant reminiscing about the bygone days of pop culture. Instead, it is a compelling history, identifying key cultural inflection points over the last 25 years that will resonate and perhaps inspire new material.
Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman ’74 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)
This latest collection by Fadiman, a Yale professor of English and a member of this magazine’s Board of Incorporators, is filled with peculiar delights: a dead frog stored in the freezer, the afterlife of a seemingly obsolete inkjet printer, a seal-and-mince-pie menu from an early twentieth-century Antarctic expedition. Fadiman’s style is conversational in a way that serves her subjects. Her penchant for list-making and deep dives draws the reader into topics that could otherwise feel discursive.
Clandestinas: Women in the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1955–1959 by Carollee Bengelsdorf, A.M. ’67, with photos by Susan Meiselas, Ed.M. ’71 (Duke, $34)
Bengelsdorf left Harvard in 1969 to travel to Cuba as part of the Committee of Returned Volunteers, ex-Peace Corps members opposed to the Vietnam War. It was the first of many trips to Cuba and the beginning of a career-long examination of the intersection of gender and politics movements she explores in Clandestinas. Through years of research and dozens of interviews with former clandestinas—women who were part of the urban underground during the Cuban Revolution—Bengelsdorf challenges the prevailing revolutionary narrative and the distillation of Cuba’s national identity into “a male construct, excluding women as active subjects.”
Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D. ’85, Ph.D. ’89, (W.W. Norton, $28.99)
“Don’t be a schmuck!”: the title of chapter one would make an equally fitting, albeit a tad more aggressive, title for this straightforward compendium of sound medical advice. Attempting to side-step the pendulum swing of medical recommendations and wellness gurus, Emanuel, who once famously wrote that he’d accept death before old age, offers a path to organically integrating wellness into one’s life. While much will seem familiar as no-brainer advice, such as avoiding unnecessary risks and combating cognitive decline, the doctor prescribes attainable methods and some surprising tidbits—for instance, forgoing retirement—while dispelling other popular wisdom with trustworthy candor.
Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, by Dan Chiasson, Ph.D. ’02 (Knopf, $35)
The transformation of “one small city, one small state” ignites a political revolution in this memoir and cultural history of a mass movement. With Bernie Sanders as the lens, Chiasson, a poet and literary critic, offers a genesis story about shifting identities in Burlington and Vermont, inexorably linked with Sanders’s rise as a national political force. Written with the intimacy of a love letter to the author’s hometown, its 500-plus pages are filled with Burlington characters, vignettes of Bernie being Bernie, and key inflection points that capture the consistency of Sanders’s messaging and paint an unrivaled portrait of Vermont over the last 50 years.
The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Philosophy by Harvey C. Mansfield (Harvard, $35)
Intellectual revolutions—and the minds behind them—take center stage in The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, based on the author’s famous long-running Harvard course, Gov 1061. Here, we are reminded time and again that modern ideas can be old and vice versa. Former students and others from Mansfield’s 60-plus years at Harvard will no doubt recognize the reading list (Locke, Kant, Nietzsche) from his lectures. Now retired, Mansfield, the Kenan professor of government emeritus, remains a leading conservative voice, a proponent of ideological diversity at universities, and an ardent Machiavelli fanboy.
Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty by Delia Duong Ba Wendel, M.D.S. ’07, Ph.D. ’16 (Duke, $36.95 paperback)
What does it mean to ethically memorialize a genocide? For some, preserving sites of violence as public spaces is itself a form of justice and prevention; for others, it can veer into dehumanization. From state-approved museums and hidden local tributes to visceral sites of violence and unmarked spaces, this text interacts with the diverse “memory landscape.” Wendel, an associate professor of urban studies and international development at MIT, explores “the ethical stakes and afterlives of genocide memory” through interdisciplinary research into the heritage of the Rwandan genocide and the competing ideologies at work.
The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences by Margareta Matache, M.P.A. ’19 (Routledge, $48.99 paperback)
For centuries, gadje—those outside of the Roma community and culture—have written and shaped the history of Romani people throughout Europe, a continuation of the group’s oppression. Matache, who is of Roma descent, uses and translates key terms of the Romani language. The co-founding director of the Roma Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, she delivers an urgent, foundational framework for understanding structural anti-Roma racism, tracing its origins to the system of racialized slavery that existed in the territories that later became Romania.
