Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2019 i The American Scholar

The New Orleans second line is a brass-band parade named for the second group of onlookers following a first line of musicians and official marchers. The parades got their start when bands hired to accompany funeral processions would, on the way back from the cemetery, play joyful, upbeat songs to celebrate the life of the deceased. Second-line parades take place not only during holidays such as Mardi Gras, but also throughout the year, as documented in Nima Taradji’s photographs. “I first became aware of second-line parades when I was taking a photography workshop in New Orleans. Their history goes back to the time after the Civil War, when insurance companies wouldn’t insure black customers, so African-American neighborhoods created their own social clubs, where members paid monthly dues to receive insurance…

Growing up in Washington, D.C., David Shields dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. Now an English professor at the University of South Carolina, Shields is part of an agricultural revolution with a future that lies in the past—one focused on preserving plant landraces, old cultivars that adapted to local conditions over generations. “I got involved as the researcher because I thought it would be an interesting challenge,” says Shields. “Little did I know I would be consigning huge portions of my life away.” Poring over 18th- and 19th-century farming journals, Shields has uncovered complex planting schedules and crop rotations employed in the preindustrial South. In researching stories about merchants, restaurants, and cooks, he has found recipes for foods no one has tasted in decades. And by exploring the region’s back roads,…

IN THE EARLY EVENING OF August 14, 2017, a young woman climbed a ladder and looped a yellow strap around the neck of the “silent sentinel”—a statue of a Confederate soldier that had stood for nearly a century in front of the old county courthouse in Durham, North Carolina. More than 100 protesters had gathered to watch. Consisting mainly of young people of color, graduate students, union members, and gay activists, they represented a coalition of groups loosely organized as “Defend Durham.” Some of them had clashed with the alt-right in Charlottesville just two days before. Now, steps away from one of Durham’s neoclassical landmark buildings, they formed a tug-of-war-style line and pulled on the yellow strap. The statue and its base detached from the stone plinth, hitting the grass…

SONTAG: Her Life and Work BY BENJAMIN MOSER Ecco, 832 pp., $39.99 NO VERBIAGE MARS the visual immediacy of Sontag: Her Life and Work. The biography’s cover is filled entirely by a photograph of its subject, a cynosure of American cultural life from the 1960s until her death in 2004. An androgynous figure who might have been a fashion model if she were not an essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and activist, she is both seductive and defiant as she challenges the viewer with a knowing gaze. Sontag did, in fact, appear in an Absolut Vodka ad, and her glamorous image was captured by many of the most prominent photographers of her time, including Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Andy Warhol, and her longtime companion, Annie Leibovitz. The gap…

THE BODY: A Guide for Occupants BY BILL BRYSON Doubleday, 464 pp., $30 IN THE BODY: A GUIDE for Occupants, his latest amble into the realm of natural science, Bill Bryson is not so much a discoverer of new lands as a charismatic cartographer of existing ones, smartly mapping points of entry into territory that might otherwise remain impenetrable to curious travelers. With light-footed prose, The Body winds its way through the dense terrain of anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry, elucidating for the reader how the human form functions. The result is an absorbing catalog of the human body in all its firmness and frailty. Bryson revels in the sublime intricacy of atoms, DNA, stem cells, cytokines, hormones, eyeballs, guts, neurons, joints, sweat glands, hair follicles, zygotes, and a great deal…

Mission to Mars George Musser’s advocacy of an Apollo-like program for a mission to Mars (“Our Fate Is in the Stars,” Summer) makes a forceful, albeit rose-colored, argument for the future direction of NASA. In touting a major Mars initiative, Musser overhypes or sidesteps a number of issues. First, he implies that the Apollo program was the driving force behind the dynamic advances in computer and electronics technology that we enjoy today. Though without question the Apollo program was an important component of that development, it must be remembered that NASA did not exist until 1958 and President Kennedy’s call for putting a man on the moon did not come until 1961. By that time, semiconductor technology was already being pursued in universities, the national laboratories, and industry, as the…

1. I wish I’d seen the Moon shortly after it formed, 4.5 billion years ago. That was in the Hadean Eon—Earth’s first eon. The Moon was three to five times closer to Earth. Big. A storybook moon. Like the one in Italo Calvino’s story “The Distance of the Moon.” In the story the Moon had an elliptical orbit. When it came near, you could go out in a boat on the ocean, put up a ladder, and climb up to it. And why do this? Because. On the Moon, moon-milk could be obtained. 2. Pterosaurs. Flying reptiles with long beaks, brightly colored crests, and membranous wings. Some species were small but someazhdarchids—were as large as giraffes! They were hollow-boned and light, and they flew fast. They lived in flocks. I…

WHEN I WAS YOUNG I spent three years as a patient at Austen Riggs, a posh mental hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where patients were, and still are, free to come and go. My parents parked me there because they had no idea what else to do with me. I’d been truant throughout high school and had failed to get into any college. At Riggs, I encountered the contrarian psychoanalyst Leslie Farber, who joined the staff a year after I arrived. I’ve written about him before; he figured prominently in my 2000 memoir, Mockingbird Years, but in those pages he was a character in my own story. Here I want to focus on him and in particular on the importance he attached to talking. He was hardly a garrulous man, but…

AND HOW ARE YOU, DR. SACKS? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks BY LAWRENCE WESCHLER Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $28 WRITTEN BY ONE brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressively erudite and impossibly cuddly.” Sacks comes across as singular. For many years, he lived by himself on City Island, not far from Manhattan, in a house he acquired when he swam out there, saw a house he liked, learned that it was for sale, and bought it that afternoon, his wet trunks dripping in the real estate agent’s office. He regularly swam for miles in the ocean, sometimes…

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW: Why We Traded the Commuting Life for a Little House on the Prairie BY CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM Harper, 288 pp., $24.99 THE DREAM OF relocating to the countryside in search of a slower-paced, more meaningful life has a proud literary tradition. Consider Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. But if the impulse isn’t new, neither are the cautions against seeking its fulfillment. “You people there in the capital are interested in the provinces solely from a poetic viewpoint, that is to say, the picturesque,” a rural administrator tells a wealthly Muscovite in Anton Chekhov’s 1895 novella Three Years, “but I assure you, my friend, there is nothing in the least poetic here—there is barbarism,…

I feel my chest tighten as the open air is choked with the iron smell of blood, burning hair, and melting rubber. EVANS AFRIYIE-GYAWU has a process. If you ever share a beer with him, he’ll open the bottle himself, ask for a plastic cup that’s not from the top or bottom of the stack, and clean the rim of the bottle with a wet wipe. Then he’ll pour some of the alcohol into the cup to semisterilize it, pour it out, refill the cup, and finally take a drink. As a toxicologist and public health expert, Afriyie-Gyawu sees contamination in places most people don’t, which makes it odd to find himsurroundedbyburning tires and smoldering carcasses in one of the largest meat-processing facilities in Kumasi, a city of two million…

ON JUNE 7, 2019, one day after the 75th anniversary of the D -Day landings, Maine’s governor Janet T. Mills signed “An Act To Establish ‘Ballad of the 20th Maine’ as the Official State Ballad.” The 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, commanded by college professor-turned-colonel Joshua Chamberlain, is known primarily for its stand on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, in July 1863. The ballad, Governor Mills explained at the bill signing, reminds “us of our proud heritage, the role our great state has played in the history of our nation, and to be forever grateful to those who served and saved our country.” Written by The Ghost of Paul Revere, a folk band from Portland, and released in 2015, the new state ballad is narrated by a…

I AM A HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER, which is to say a peddler of the canon. When I justify this job, mostly to myself, I argue that teaching literature means teaching where we come from, even who we are. Few of my American students, though, see their lives reflected in the texts I’m charged with teaching. The same was true in my first teaching job, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal 19 years ago. Very few of my Nepali students wanted to do the assigned reading, but they all wanted me to visit their homes. When students like Rohit or Raj Kumar or Sabitri invited me for a meal, I always went. To get to Sabitri’s house, I followed her frizzy black ponytail while steering my bike through the…

THE EUROPEANS: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture BY ORLANDO FIGES Metropolitan, 592 pp., $35 SOME WRITERS USE a telescope to look at the world, others a microscope. Orlando Figes, a British historian well known for his work on Russian history, uses both to his readers’ constant surprise and delight. His subject in his new book is the culture that took form in Europe beginning in the 1840s. Notwithstanding their political differences, intellectuals and literary and artistic types read the same books, admired the same paintings, played the same music, and enjoyed the same operas across the continent. According to Figes, this convergence would not have been possible without the advent of the railways. His telescopic lens examines the consequences of this innovation in all its aspects.…

PLAGUED BY FIRE: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright BY PAUL HENDRICKSON Knopf, 624 pp., $35 IN 1957, WHILE IN New York supervising the construction of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright agreed to be interviewed on television by journalist Mike Wallace. By this time, Wright was 90 years old, the author of several hundred buildings, and a global celebrity—one who played the role of the uncompromising artist to the hilt. About 10 minutes in, Wallace noted that a younger Wright had proclaimed that he would be the greatest architect of the 20th century. Had he reached his goal? Wright denied that he had ever said such a thing. Wallace pointed out he had said it on the record, multiple times. Outflanked (for once), Wright partially backed down.…