Moments after they meet, the titular character of the new novel Lucien christens his Harvard roommate with a new name: Atlas. A titan to hold up the heavens, a character condemned to endure. Employing every conceivable trick—including quoting the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—to sway his roommate on the name change, Lucien demonstrates how easily identity can be mythologized; the story that follows tackles the consequences.
Mythmaking abounds in this issue’s selection of books. At the hands of time and power structures, certain fables and theories become canon in the annals of history and science, while others are exiled and discredited.
As always, we are confronted by the limitless—and sometimes insidious—power of storytelling.
Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley ’08 (Astra House, $28)
In this interdisciplinary debut, dissatisfaction and the modern human condition collide with the exaggerated physical landscapes of reality TV. Dream Facades explores the “real places swollen with the fantasies projected onto them” on shows like Selling Sunset, The Kardashians, and various Real Housewives franchises (note: your guilty pleasure knowledge of reality TV will come in handy). Instead of a coffee-table tour of these homes, Morley, an editor at the magazine Dwell, contextualizes the cultural and architectural shifts—building booms and busts, urbanization, planned obsolescence, and the commodification of personal style in home design—that fuel these dream facades and our fascination with them.
The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson ’94 (Scribner, $31)
In 1888, Ella Watson, a homesteader and cattle rancher in Wyoming, embodied the rugged individualism and entrepreneurial spirit of the American West, with one critical flaw: she was a woman with power. For that, we learn, she lost everything. History branded her as “Cattle Kate,” an outlaw and rabble-rousing prostitute. Hers is one of seven immersive portraits in The Westerners, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Nelson. Here, the complex narratives of Indigenous and non-white communities and women who helped shape the West come alive in vivid detail to challenge a prevailing myth of the frontier—that it belonged only to white males—and the remnants of manifest destiny that shape American culture and politics to this day.
The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball by Noam Cohen ’89 (The New Press, $22 paperback)
That same allegiance to radical individualism—this time with the internet as the new frontier—threatens American democracy in these origin stories of the deemed know-it-alls, tech moguls with household names: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, to cite a few. Cohen, a former New York Times technology columnist, positions the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a driving factor in the evolution of computer science, captured best through his portrait of John McCarthy, a pioneer of both. First published in 2017, this updated paperback version includes a new 6,500-word introduction by Cohen in the tone of a cautionary tale already coming to pass.
The Unforgiving Hours: The Grit, Resilience, and Perseverance at the Heart of Endurance Sports by Shannon Hogan, A.L.M. ’23 (VeloPress, $28.95)
Run longer, swim farther, push harder—what propels humans to seek extremes and test their limits for sport? The Unforgiving Hours is concerned less with the psychology, and more with the journey. Hogan regales us with retellings of endurance triumphs: ultrarunners finding their way in 100-mile courses, sailors making their way to Alaska sans motor, and a 15-year-old swimmer traversing the choppy waters of the English Channel to set a new world record. No stranger to feats of strength, Hogan—a former pro mountain biker and ultrarunner—writes with reverence and exhilaration that evokes the adrenaline rush of someone who has hit the same highs.
Lucien by J.R. Thornton ’14 (Harper, $18.99 paperback)
A working-class art prodigy is plunged into the bacchanalian underbelly of Harvard filled with characters whose very names evoke entitlement…Atlas, Dante, Crosby, Steinway, Zola, and Xander. From the first encounter, the title character propels both narrative and narrator forward with an ever-looming anvil of class injustice waiting to drop. The book is rife with final clubs, art forgery, and a Gatsby-esque fascination with a subculture of the Harvard experience that will resonate with some College alums more than others—but that nevertheless informs the Harvard mythos in the outside world.
Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans by Robert J. Sampson (Belknap, $29.95)
Does when we are make us who we are? This unprecedented study traces the lives of more than 1,000 Chicago children in multiple birth cohorts over the course of nearly 30 years, revealing how key social and historical changes can shape crucial human development stages. One startling finding: a child born in the mid-1980s was more than twice as likely to be arrested as one born just 10 years later, despite identical backgrounds, neighborhoods, and risk factors. Along the way, Sampson, a sociologist and Flowers University Professor at Harvard, asks us to rethink longstanding risk assessment tools used to predict criminal behavior, as well as our collective tendency to categorize social progress and decline
as linear.
Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It by Tyler Beck Goodspeed ’07, Ph.D. ’14 (Basic Venture, $30)
Boom, bust; up like a rocket, down like a feather. Economics is filled with supposed truisms. Here, Goodspeed debunks the cyclical theory of recessions as a necessary price for periods of economic expansion and as a natural and useful palate cleanser in economic history. Blending case studies and sharp analysis, Goodspeed, the chief economist at ExxonMobil and briefly the acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, unpacks a confluence of questionable decisions, miscalculations, and global catastrophes that have led to recessions and suggests how we can prevent their recurrence.
The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck by Jessica Riskin ’88 (Riverhead, $32)
Being ahead of your time often puts you at war with it. Innovative French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had a knack for antagonizing those in power and theorizing concepts that would render him an “exile of mainstream science.” In this humanizing portrait, Lamarck is often out of sync with his counterparts: while he is engrossed in the diversity of living things, spending his days studying worms, his fellow scientists are betting on phrenology, which will later be used to support eugenics. With nuance and wit (cue: “The Battle of the Mollusks!”), Riskin revives Lamarck and his idea that living beings play an active role in their own transformation.
Mule Boy by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue, $17.99 paperback)
The light stamp of a mule’s hoof and the twitch of its ear are all that forebode pending disaster in a Pennsylvania coal mine that collapses on New Year’s Day in 1929. In this novel, Ondro, the 13-year-old boy tending to the mule cart, survives but will spend much of his life navigating the guilt and suspicions of “a darkness deeper than any tomb in the mines.” Over a series of visitations later in life, Ondro retells the final moments of those who passed. Krivak, a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Harvard and the descendant of a coal mining casualty, writes with pulsating rhythm and simple, elegiac prose that echoes the language of his forebears. The anthracite’s sheen, the smell of a carbide lamp, and the memento mori will cling to you long after reading.
Animal Intelligence: The Book of Forgotten History by Will Shin, M.P.A. ’15; illustrated by Alice Shin (Student B, $10 e-book)
The Shin siblings have created an enigmatic reimagining of history through the eyes of animals who have watched by
the sidelines as humans have fumbled through civilization. It may take a moment to find one’s bearings in this alternate world of dinosaurs dropping one-liners, cats engaged in espionage, and enlightened pythons, but the book’s blend of fable, philosophy, and quirky cartoons offers an insightful critique of humanity accessible to adults as well as younger readers.
