Jennifer Szalai

During the 1930s, New York-based anthropologist Franz Boas grew increasingly worried about events in his native Germany. He was in his 70s, and close to retiring from Columbia University, where he taught his students to reject the junk science underpinning the country’s restrictive immigration laws, colonial expansion and Jim Crow. Born into a Jewish burgher family, Boas was horrified to see how the Nazis took inspiration from Americans’ pathbreaking work in eugenics and state-sanctioned bigotry. He started to put the word “race” in scare quotes, calling it a “dangerous fiction.”

Boas is at the center of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air,” a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of “us” and “them.” “This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,” King writes, “the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.”

A century ago, the prospect of a common humanity seemed radical to an American public that had been schooled in the inherent superiority of Western civilization. Boas and his disciples argued for pluralism and tolerance at a time when cross-cultural empathy was deemed not just threatening but almost unfathomable.

King’s elegant and kaleidoscopic book takes its title from Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas’ who contrasted the capacious perspective offered by the “gods of the upper air” with the cramped corner guarded by the “gods of the pigeonholes.” Conducting ethnographic research in the Caribbean, Hurston said that she planned to return to the United States with two books: “One for anthro. and one for the way I want to write it.” That second book became her lush novel about life around the Gulf Coast, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Hurston, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ella Cara Deloria are the other central figures in King’s book; like Boas, all of them came to see anthropology “not just as a science but also as a state of mind.” His ideas were particularly appealing to women who chafed at the patriarchal order. Men were constantly spouting specious and self-serving theories of what was natural; here was a man suggesting that those things might not be so natural after all.

Boas became a pivotal figure in the discipline — though at first he was marginal, an itinerant scholar who had a hard time landing a secure position in the United States. For a while he held a curatorship at the relatively young American Museum of Natural History, but the museum was a creature of the establishment, hosting grand conferences on eugenics and showcasing displays on the “ill effects of racial interbreeding.” The then-dominant school of anthropology propped up a narrative tracing “the stages of human culture,” from “savagery” through to “barbarism” and finally to “civilization.” Mainstream scholars insisted that white supremacy was justified by head measurements and heel length.

Overturning this terrible science required more than fervent criticism. King, a professor at Georgetown and the author of several books about Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describes how Boas tried to use the methods of physical anthropologists against them, deploying calipers and eye-color meters to show that the children of immigrants, born in the United States, had more in common with other American-born children than with the national groups represented by their parents. But Boas’ work in the field only accounted for part of his influence. It was mainly through his teaching at Columbia and his nurturing of a new generation of anthropologists that he changed how many Americans saw the world and, consequently, themselves.

King weaves in the stories of Hurston and Deloria, who used what they learned from Boas to study their own communities. Hurston’s “Mules and Men,” a book about African-American folklore, included an immersive account of her return to the Florida she left during the Great Migration, and her experience as not just an observer of the community but a participant in it. Deloria, who was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was a co-writer with Boas of “Dakota Grammar”; she worked on it for a decade, explaining to Boas the delicate process of deciding on the right gifts to coax candid talk from her informants. “To go at it like a white man, for me, an Indian,” she said, “is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and my people.”

Mead and Benedict found a measure of freedom in their work. The thrice-married Mead, whose “Coming of Age in Samoa” argued that many assumptions about adolescence and sexuality were culturally contingent, had little patience for the monogamy that was expected of her; what a puritan culture wanted to call “deviancy” was, King writes, “a simple mismatch between her own temperament and the society into which she had been born.” Benedict, for her part, had been a depressed housewife before she became an anthropologist (and, for a time, Mead’s lover); she articulated the Boasian approach in her book “Patterns of Culture,” and gave its core idea a memorable name: “cultural relativity.”

King includes some of the more vexed aspects of this history, including Boas’ involvement in a sham funeral for an indigenous Greenlander whose cadaver had been secretly harvested in the name of scientific research. “Boas’s ideas,” King writes, “were often ahead of his practice.” Not to mention that social science is, well, an inexact science. The honest observer was bound to realize “how hard it was to pin down anything at all about someone else’s culture.”

This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book, even if the United States of the early 20th century isn’t quite the perfect mirror. Boas and his circle confronted a bigotry that was scientifically endorsed at the time, and they dismantled it by showing it wasn’t scientific at all; today’s nativists and racists generally don’t even pretend to a scientific respectability, resorting instead to a warped version of cultural relativism for fuel in their culture war.

But what Boas advised wasn’t so much a program as a disposition — an openness toward others and a scrutiny of oneself. As King writes, “The most enduring prejudices are the comfortable ones, those hidden up close.”

“Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century”

By Charles King

Illustrated. 431 pages. Doubleday. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/books/review-gods-of-upper-air-charles-king.html" id="cf96aed5-1bbd-313f-ac09-b3b853f067a7">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

How a Group of Heretical Thinkers Chipped Away at the Idea of 'Us' and 'Them'

Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” linguist Gretchen McCulloch acknowledges a paradox at the heart of her book. On the one hand, books about usage tend to enshrine language in a set of rules, and woe to anyone who tries to break them. On the other, the “new rules” floating in the digital ether are constantly changing; anything tethered to the material world of dead trees can’t possibly keep up.

McCulloch doesn’t have a problem with this. “Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity,” she writes, “we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor.”

With “Because Internet,” she has written an incisive and entertaining guidebook of her own. I was reflexively suspicious of her title — the “because noun” construction is quintessential internetese — but by reading this book I’ve gained a clearer sense why. To someone like me, who was introduced to email in college, the language of online chatter can look almost aggressively cute in the context of a book.

I’m one of what McCulloch calls, with her linguist’s affection for taxonomy, the Semi Internet People — those who “defined themselves by ambivalence towards technology and an orientation towards offline relationships over online ones.” Unlike Full Internet People, who grew up with the internet and never questioned its social potential, Semis tend to assume that conveying the entire social meaning of a message is better accomplished by a voice conversation, whether in person or (to the barely disguised panic of Full Internet People) in a phone call.

But the phone itself was once a profoundly disruptive technology for the English language (and presumably for other languages, too, though this book’s focus is English). As McCulloch explains in one of many illuminating historical anecdotes, simply settling on a standard greeting made for acute confusion. What initially started as a battle between “ahoy” and “hello” (another contender was “what is wanted?” — my new phone greeting) was eventually resolved in favor of “hello”; the word has the same origins as “holler,” and was used at the time as a call for attention.

“Hello” later became an acceptable greeting for all kinds of interactions, but it took a while for it to lose its whiff of impertinence. Now “hello” is not just polite but even a bit formal, compared with a nonchalant “hi!” or “hey!”

Or make that “hey!!!!!” Exclamation points, unlike the period, have so far escaped obsolescence in customarily punctuation-free online interaction; if anything, they’ve been cheapened by overuse, with a single exclamation point being negligibly more eager than no exclamation point at all.

But a string of them, in our age of hyperbole, can sound insincere. McCulloch doesn’t parse the ascendancy of the double exclamation, but “!!” — taking care to keep one’s exclamation points to exactly two — is apparently emerging as the marker of genuine enthusiasm.

For now, at least. One of the overarching themes of “Because Internet” is how fluid all of these norms are. McCulloch says that online exchanges like chats, texts and social media posts afford linguists like her an ideal opportunity for study. Internet language is “beautifully mundane” and, unlike speech, it leaves behind a convenient written record.

Formal language, she says, is mostly disembodied; informal language isn’t. When we talk to a friend, we deploy gestures and facial expressions to give more context to what we’re saying; on the phone, without visual cues, our vocal inflections, volume and laughter do the job. McCulloch is remarkably good at showing how internet speech has been evolving “to restore our bodies to our writing,” as certain online conventions have changed over time.

Take “LOL,” or what is now more typically written as “lol.” As early internet slang, “LOL” meant “laughing out loud,” but then its definition softened, acquiring additional layers of meaning. The lowercase “lol” is still a “word in transition,” McCulloch says, signifying “amusement, irony and even passive aggression.” It can temper a statement that might otherwise sound confrontational (“what are you doing out so late lol”) or gently poke fun at someone (“good morning lol” to a friend who woke up at noon).

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety. Emotions can be quickly and efficiently conveyed by the “sarcasm tilde” (“isn’t that ~special”) and “expressive lengthening” (“yesssss” and “bothhhh”). A lot of innuendo can be contained in the tiny emoji of an eggplant.

But being attuned to such fine gradations of meaning can make for extreme sensitivity, too. A Full Internet Person might read annoyance or anger into a sentence that ends with a period. I was surprised to learn that the dot-dot-dot of ellipsis in emails and texts, which I usually associated with a simple (and harmless) pause in thought, is “especially perilous.” Younger people indicate a simple pause with a line break or a new message; they “infer emotional meaning” from an ellipsis because they wonder what it’s doing there, and what it might be insinuating.

Reflecting on these changes in “expressive typography,” McCulloch is fully celebratory: “I’d gladly accept the decline of standards that were arbitrary and elitist in the first place in favor of being able to better connect with my fellow humans.” She sees internet language as offering us a chance “to write not for power, but for love.” But it’s hard to look at online discourse today and fail to notice that some people are writing for hate. The “in-group vocabulary” of internet language and memes isn’t just inclusive; its ability to induce a “rush of fellow-feeling” often relies on excluding an out-group, too.

Formal language can be chilly and impersonal, but it abides by explicit rules and can therefore be taught, rather than relying on fuzzier paths of transmission. As McCulloch herself observes, the formality is designed to appeal to a general audience — something that used to sound basic and boring but seems to be in awfully short supply these days.

“One type of writing hasn’t replaced the other,” McCulloch writes, taking care to emphasize that the situation between formal language and internet language isn’t zero-sum. She’s immersed in online life, where she sees the future looking emancipatory and bright. “There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you,” she insists. I hope she’s right lol.

Publication Notes:

Understanding the New Rules of Language”

Illustrated. 326 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/books/review-because-internet-understanding-new-rules-language-gretchen-mcculloch.html" id="884d6247-fea9-3b82-acae-99e822f84465">The New York Times</a>.

Why Has Language Changed So Much So Fast? 'Because Internet'

But it’s not as if the Trump team became more disciplined and tight-lipped in its second year. As Wolff explains in “Siege,” a number of the people who helped him on the first book have left the administration but are still in on the gossip loop, joining Wolff in what he calls “my train-wreck fascination with Trump — that certain knowledge that in the end he will destroy himself.”

One of these people is Steve Bannon, who gets pride of place in Wolff’s acknowledgments, thanked for “his trust and cooperation” as “the Virgil anyone might be lucky to have as a guide for a descent into Trumpworld.” Wolff says “it is a measure of Bannon’s character that he stood by his remarks in ‘Fire and Fury’ without complaint, quibbles or hurt feelings.”

This is a strangely effusive measure of gratitude for Bannon, whom Wolff calls “the man arguably most responsible” for Trump’s presidency. After all, Bannon isn’t exactly known for holding traditional values like “character” and “trust and cooperation” in much esteem.

“Siege” is ostensibly about Trump — portrayed here as a very unstable nongenius cracking under the pressure of being thrust into the highest office — but its guiding worldview looks remarkably like Bannon’s. It’s a mordant, readable tell-all designed to show how Trump, simply by being Trump, has made himself the perfect wrecking ball, blasting holes through an array of institutions.

There are salacious details in this book — many of which Trump’s critics will want to eat up — though with so many unnamed sources, Trump’s compulsion for hyperbole and Wolff’s own journalistic record, it’s hard to know which tidbits to trust. It makes more sense to read “Siege” less as a news report and more as a rhetorical gambit — a twisted bid to burnish Bannon’s anti-establishment legacy.

“Siege” begins in February 2018, and takes us up to the delivery of the Mueller report this past March. Leaked information about the book has homed in on Wolff’s claim that the Mueller team, back in March 2018, drafted a proposed indictment of the president — an assertion that a spokesman for the special counsel has already denied.

For anyone eager to relive the last year, Wolff tracks the scandals (or the major ones, at least — who can count?) in all their bewildering abasement. A sampler: There’s Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit. There’s Trump’s insistence that he could, if he needed to, pardon himself. There’s Melania’s mysterious hospitalization (Wolff doesn’t seem to know why she was hospitalized either). There’s the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and Jared Kushner “in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter” trying to defend the Saudis by disparaging Khashoggi as a “terrorist.”

Kushner comes across in this account as perhaps the saddest figure of all: a hapless schemer. Wolff says that Kushner failed to pass the normal security clearances, and was granted a reprieve only when Trump intervened (calling this assertion “a fact baldly denied by Kushner and his wife”).

The Kushner family’s Byzantine real estate troubles were, Wolff says, mysteriously solved once a Toronto-based investment firm that worked with a number of sovereign wealth funds stepped in to bail Kushner out. Wolff has Kushner petitioning Henry Kissinger for his advice on international affairs, even floating the suggestion of Kissinger as Trump’s secretary of state soon after the 2016 election; at the time, Kissinger was already 94 years old.

Wolff says that Kushner represents “liberal globalism,” though he doesn’t offer much to back it up, instead repeating Bannon’s pet theory that Kushner’s behavior shows how glaringly hypocritical the “true and deeply self-interested face of liberal globalism” actually was. Against this, Bannon positions his own “party of the peasants,” with their “peasant honesty, peasant wisdom and peasant loyalty,” prompting Wolff to make what is either a deeply ironic or inadvertently hilarious comparison of Bannon to Tolstoy.

The political analysis in this book is close to nil, but that’s by design. “The heart of this book,” Wolff says, is the experience of the Trump presidency: “an emotional state rather than a political state.” Policies, decision-making, anything that requires even a minimal amount of attention to detail — that happens, as much as possible, without Trump, Wolff says. The president’s staff sees it as their job to keep him in his “bubble,” munching candy bars at night and getting his ego stroked in marathon phone calls with the Fox News host Sean Hannity. On good days, Wolff writes, the president arrives late to the office and is whisked through a series of staged, anodyne meetings to keep him busy: “A distracted Trump was a happy Trump.”

Bannon, meanwhile, even having left the White House in 2017, clearly maintains some connections to it, gleefully watching the chaos from the sidelines and appearing before the special counsel five times — or possibly eight, Wolff says, according to some whispers from “Bannon enemies.” Bannon seems comfortable expressing contempt for pretty much everyone — not least the president he helped elect into office. (Though Bannon does declare a measure of respect for Vladimir Putin — “a badass” — and, in what might be the most truly shocking turn in the book, Nancy Pelosi, for disinviting Trump from delivering the State of the Union in January and thereby insulting him in the language he most viscerally understands: humiliation. “She crushed this [expletive],” Bannon marvels.)

“Siege” reads like a 300-page taunt of the president — from Wolff or from Bannon, though they seem to have arrived at the kind of collaboration in which the distinction doesn’t really matter. In the afterword to the paperback edition of “Fire and Fury,” Wolff bragged about how he “did an end run around the system, catching the journalism apparatus as well as the White House unawares,” deriding the “journalism bureaucracy” for putting so much stock in such niceties as confidentiality and integrity.

So now Wolff gets another probable best seller, and Bannon, who boasts about communicating with Trump through the media, gets to show the president who’s really boss. “Bannon believed he was the man of populist destiny and not Donald Trump,” Wolff writes, with Bannon even entertaining the idea of being a presidential contender in 2020. Bannon might wax sentimental about the country’s white working class — whom he lovingly calls “deplorables” — but he treats them as endlessly credulous, riling them up with stories about immigrant caravans and the boons of a trade war while offering them nothing more concrete than the fireworks display of watching the establishment burn.

Wolff describes Bannon staying in a $4,500-a-night hotel suite in London — not quite the typical peasant digs, but Bannon thinks like a hedge fund guy even as he rails against them. By the same token, Trump’s misfortune might well turn out to be Bannon’s opportunity. As Bannon tells Wolff, in a rambling, five-page monologue: “I’ll cover myself on the downside.”

Publication Information:

335 pages. Henry Holt and Co. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a9a11196-4989-4557-a094-09488ace74be" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/books/review-siege-trump-under-fire-michael-wolff.html">The New York Times</a>.

In 'Siege: Trump Under Fire,' Michael Wolff chats with Steve Bannon while the establishment burns

(Books of The Times): You might think that Michael Wolff, whose blockbuster “Fire and Fury” wasn’t exactly a glowing portrait of President Donald Trump’s first year in the White House, might have burned so many bridges that a second insider book on the administration would have been an impossible task.

Much like Holbrooke himself, who died in 2010 at 69, Packer’s book is charming, brilliant, cocksure and exasperating. “If you cut out the destructive element,” Packer writes of his subject, “you would kill the thing that made him almost great.” The same apparently goes for the country whose interests Holbrooke pledged to represent. Lamenting the end of the American century — or what was “really just a little more than half a century, and that was the span of Holbrooke’s life” — Packer gets nostalgic: “It wasn’t a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. The best about us was inseparable from the worst.”

Packer, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker before moving to The Atlantic, considered Holbrooke a friend. The two men shared a “liberal internationalist” sensibility and an ardent faith in the salutary effects of U.S.-led humanitarian intervention — in the notion that human suffering in far-off places compelled the United States to “do something.”

After 9/11, Packer and Holbrooke were early supporters of the Iraq War, although their subsequent responses played out in very different ways. Packer wrote “The Assassins’ Gate,” a deeply reported 2005 book about the war and acknowledged he had been wrong; Holbrooke, a lifelong Democrat, “had no desire to see Baghdad for himself” and treated the war as something he wanted to forget.

Holbrooke had lots of friends, a number of them journalists, whom he plied with dinner-party invitations and well-timed leaks. That this biography even exists is a testament to Holbrooke’s almost uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with the press. He never ascended to the position he so desperately wanted — secretary of state — and his biggest diplomatic accomplishment was his role in the 1995 Dayton Accords, which laid the groundwork for a tenuous peace in Bosnia. Even Packer calls it an “unjust” agreement, and he can’t quite exalt it, as much as he wants to. (“Let’s give him his due,” he writes of Holbrooke. “He ended a war. Well, he and others.”)

Packer, who wrote a profile of Holbrooke for The New Yorker in 2009, has plenty of material to work with. He conducted nearly 250 interviews, and he quotes liberally from Holbrooke’s notebooks and correspondence, entrusted to him by Holbrooke’s third wife and widow, Kati Marton, who “imposed no conditions whatsoever.” “Our Man” makes some high-minded noises about how Holbrooke’s death marked the definitive “end of the American century,” but the reason to read this book is less for Packer’s wistful tributes to American exceptionalism than for his consummate skills as a storyteller.

“Our Man” is divided into three parts — Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan — to mark the “three fiendish wars” that defined Holbrooke’s career. Packer rushes through Holbrooke’s childhood in New York City and Scarsdale, New York, although he doesn’t have to rush too much to get to Vietnam, when Holbrooke was an ambitious 22-year-old stationed with the Foreign Service in the Mekong Delta, trying to generate goodwill by unloading surplus bulgur wheat to feed the locals. Hearing unofficial reports of civilian deaths, Holbrooke felt stirrings of doubt — “We are fighting wrong, and it hurts” — although as much as he deplored the tactics, he couldn’t bring himself to question the war itself.

In 1966, he married his college sweetheart and moved to Washington, D.C., with the goal of becoming an assistant secretary of state by age 35 — which he achieved during the Carter administration, when he was appointed assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Two decades later, as an ambassador to the United Nations, Holbrooke would cajole Indonesia into stopping its genocidal campaign in East Timor; in the late 1970s, however, he was overlooking Indonesia’s brutal repression of the East Timorese in order to push for its purchase of U.S. fighter jets.

It’s a remarkable trajectory that Packer never fully elucidates, except by suggesting that Holbrooke’s Indonesian contacts in the 1970s meant that he could be more effective in the late 1990s, when his transformation into a stalwart humanitarian was complete.

Or almost complete. Later, in 2002, Holbrooke’s reasons for supporting the impending war in Iraq had to do with fear — not just of Saddam Hussein but also of the possibility that “a soft Democrat was politically doomed.” He persuaded Sen. John Kerry to vote for the war resolution by warning him of how perilous it was to look weak on national security. “If that was Holbrooke’s main reason for supporting the war,” Packer writes, “it might have been better to be stupidly, disastrously wrong in a sincerely held belief like some of us.”

Better? How so? Intentions seem to matter a lot to Packer — which might explain why, despite his moments of discomfort when writing about the more unseemly displays of Holbrooke’s grasping ambition, he wills himself into giving Holbrooke the benefit of the doubt.

There’s plenty of grasping to contend with, especially after Holbrooke started making money in the private sector between Democratic administrations, working as a consultant to companies like Nike and landing cushy gigs as an (ineffectual) investment banker. Holbrooke and his third wife, Marton, strategized the seating charts for their glitzy dinner parties as if they were drawing up battlefield plans; they obtained a sweetheart loan from Countrywide Financial — which later collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis — to pay for several of their nine properties (including not one but two houses in Telluride); they both carried on affairs “in a class where affairs were practically expected,” with Holbrooke moving in to kiss a younger woman he worked with without waiting for her explicit consent. “He claimed her in the way of an entitled great man,” Packer writes.

Elite decadence doesn’t seem to be the story Packer set out to tell, but he’s too gifted a writer to fail to notice it (“A whole class of people in Washington and New York sent other people’s children to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq while they found ways to get rich”), even if his affection for his protagonist means that Holbrooke emerges in this account as flawed, yes, and fallibly human, of course, but ultimately meaning well.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused” — the line is from “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s 1955 novel about noble intentions gone awry in Vietnam. Packer quotes it, grudgingly, before adding: “My god, Greene loathed Americans.”

It’s a strange, drive-by generalization to make about an author who infused his novel with an intractable ambivalence. But then such knee-jerk moralizing is, as Packer admits, an American tradition: “We swing wildly between superhuman exertion and sullen withdrawal, always looking for the answers in our own goodness and wisdom instead of where they lie, out in the world.”

‘Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century’

Illustrated. 592 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a id="eccb6f6e-9732-4e80-b4da-c3b7bbab8e5f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/books/review-our-man-richard-holbrooke-george-packer.html">The New York Times</a>.

The agony and the ecstasy of Richard Holbrooke

(Books of The Times): There’s something telling about the fact that “Our Man,” George Packer’s hefty, dishy biography of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, clocks in at more than 500 pages without the courtesy of an index. This isn’t a book you’re supposed to dip into piecemeal, searching for information; it’s best appreciated like a novel, consumed whole.

In an age of glowing brain scans and plentiful pharmaceuticals, it can be hard to remember that psychiatrists — not exactly known for their aversion to dispensing medication — were once derided for not taking medicine seriously enough.

But as Anne Harrington reminds us, it wasn’t all that long ago when psychiatrists were pilloried as a bunch of woolly Freudians in thrall to specious ideas about absent fathers and smothering mothers. (Or absent mothers — there were apparently any number of ways for mothers to impair the mental health of their children.) In her new book, “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,” Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, says that psychiatry’s biological turn took place sometime around 1980, and it was so revolutionary that before the decade was up, the profession’s “transformation into a biological discipline seemed complete.”

There’s a good deal of drama contained in that little word “seemed.” What “seemed complete” actually wasn’t, Harrington argues, as such biological triumphalism began to unravel in the 1990s and the 2000s. Anticipated discoveries in the biology of mental illness, vigorously hyped before they even arrived, never panned out; all of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories are still based on observations of clinical symptoms rather than biological markers of disease. Criticism from outside the profession precipitated “a sense of internal crisis” within it. A number of psychiatry’s practitioners are beginning to concede that “it overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated and compromised its principles.”

This realization won’t necessarily put an end to what Harrington calls “the century-long — if also repeatedly frustrated — effort on the part of especially American psychiatry to define a biological mission for itself.” The potential rewards are too great. Biology is supposed to offer rigor, precision, measurements — enticing possibilities when it comes to something as nebulous and complex as the mind.

The story Harrington tells is one of push-and-pull, back-and-forth. She starts by presenting the myth she wants to dismantle — the heroic tale of biology’s triumph in the 1980s over a half-century of vulgar Freudianism. The clean lines of that cartoonish tale are easy to delineate. The case Harrington makes to rebut it is more intricate and winding, though her prose remains clear and crisp. Several times she alerts the reader to narrative road bumps by slipping in an “ironically.” I was grateful for these signposts. It turns out that psychiatry’s understanding of mental illness is full of hairpin turns and unintended consequences.

To hear the vanguard of psychiatry’s biological revolution tell it, the late 19th century was a period of incredible scientific progress for the profession, interrupted only when Freud and his acolytes took over in a palace coup. But the nostalgia obscures why psychiatry became vulnerable to a Freudian incursion in the first place. The 19th-century way of “thinking biologically,” Harrington writes, was fixated not on biochemistry but on brain anatomy. When it came to the prospect of individual recovery from mental disorders, clinicians were fatalistic rather than hopeful. They were preoccupied with “degeneration” and drawn to eugenics.

In the United States, “feeblemindedness” became a catchall diagnosis deployed by advocates of forced sterilization. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing the Supreme Court’s majority opinion for Buck v. Bell in 1927, called the eugenicist program “better for all the world” because, as he put it, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Six years later, the Nazis cited the Buck v. Bell decision as an inspiration for their own sterilization program — which in turn laid the foundations for the Third Reich’s systematic murder of those deemed genetically tainted and mentally ill.

Harrington is unsparing in her depiction of what often resembled a biological fetishism. Schizophrenic patients were subjected to insulin-induced comas or had their brains scraped by lobotomies. Some therapeutically minded psychiatrists, so impressed by the germ theory of disease, believed that psychosis could be cured by the surgical excision of “infected” organs like teeth, ovaries and colons.

Psychoanalysis and talk therapy were supposed to be antidotes to such cruelty and coarse reductionism, and by broadening psychiatry’s concerns from mental illness to the larger category of “mental hygiene,” the profession could serve a social function, too. In the postwar United States, robust mental health was seen as necessary armor for the Cold War. “The greatest prerequisite for peace,” President Harry S. Truman said in statement to the American Psychiatric Association, “must be sanity.” Neo-Freudian psychiatrists warned about bad moms who coddled their sons and thereby weakened national efforts to fight the Communist menace.

One pattern you begin to notice in “Mind Fixers” is how psychiatric theories — whether biological or psychoanalytical — had a way of grafting themselves onto prevailing prejudices of the day. Another pattern has to do with how each approach prided itself on being more compassionate and less stigmatizing than whatever had come before. Psychoanalysis might have emerged in reaction to biological psychiatry, but once the postwar psychoanalytic dispensation created “a generation of scapegoated parents” who had been blamed for their children’s mental illnesses, Harrington writes, the biological revolution of the 1980s started to look like a “road to redemption.”

We know what happened after that. Psychiatrists, seeking to distinguish themselves from other mental health professionals, moved away from talk therapy and guarded their prescribing rights. Financial incentives provided by the pharmaceutical industry meant that psychiatrists helped drug companies repurpose old medications for new illnesses, like “social anxiety disorder.” Antipsychotics would no longer be limited to schizophrenic patients; as one drug company researcher said, “It’s not like we’re making any more schizophrenic brains.” It was the medical equivalent of mission creep.

Harrington doesn’t romanticize the world of mental illness before drugs — drugs that many patients credit with offering relief and even a chance at survival. What psychiatry needs to do, she says, is narrow its focus to the most severe forms of mental illness and “make a virtue of modesty” rather than hubris. She knows it’s a somewhat fanciful idea, but it’s a measure of her own clear-eyed approach that she appeals to psychiatric practitioners’ self-interest by invoking that most valuable and (these days) elusive currency: trust. “The field would be freed,” she writes, “to find ways to rest its authority and status on more authentic foundations.”

‘Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness’

Illustrated. 366 pages. W.W. Norton &amp; Co. $27.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/books/review-mind-fixers-psychiatry-biology-mental-illness-anne-harrington.html" id="209c2bca-46d2-37a7-ad96-b1838a4a43bc">The New York Times</a>.

Mental Illness Is All in Your Brain -- or Is It?

But her transformation one morning at the age of 8 turned out to be less Barbie and more Kafka: “My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my earlobes were triple their usual size and my cheeks were throbbing hot.”

In “The Body Papers,” Talusan’s precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays, her brief turn as a “puffy pink monster,” inflamed with hives, was a sign that something monstrous was being done to her. Her father’s father, Tatang (Tagalog for “father” — Talusan uses the Filipino vocabulary for kinship ties throughout), would arrive from the Philippines for an extended visit every spring and enter Grace’s room at night, pulling her floral nightgown over her shoulders. The sexual abuse started when she was 7 and ended when she was 13, after she waited for Tatang one evening and shoved him into the bedroom wall. Seeing the look of humiliation on his face, she knew that one form of torment was over: “My rage turned to joy.”

“The Body Papers” doesn’t track a one-way march to triumph from adversity; Talusan’s essays loop in on themselves, as she retrieves old memories and finds unexpected points of connection. It was only a few years after the abuse stopped that she told her family about it. They were supportive but not surprised. Her grandfather, she learned, “was an unrelenting pedophile.” Her parents were compulsively secretive, having fled an authoritarian country where “a story could get you killed.” After her father’s student visa expired, the Talusans became unauthorized immigrants; Grace and her older sister only found out about their vulnerable status when they had to miss school for the blood tests and fingerprinting that were part of the immigration application process.

“There is no paper trail to document what happened to my body,” Talusan writes, recalling what her grandfather did to her. But once an order for her deportation arrived, a paper trail controlled her fate. She later obtained her immigration file through a Freedom of Information Act request and reproduces some of the pages in this book, as if entering them into the public record. “With a shuffle of papers,” she writes, “life as I knew it could be lost.”

Talusan is now an American citizen, though soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration she started carrying her American passport with her whenever she left the house. Documents had once posed a threat; now they were a form of protection. When she took a genetic test at the age of 33, the slip of paper showing the results saved her life. Learning that she was genetically predisposed to the cancers that had killed a number of her female relatives, Talusan decided to have her breasts and ovaries removed.

These were radical interventions for a body that had suffered from years of neglect. “I once drew a picture of myself in which my head floats over my body like a balloon,” she writes. “That’s where I really live, my head; my body is just the vehicle.” She put on weight, trying to erect a protective barrier around herself. But the boundary between her and the world had a way of warping and dissolving.

Talusan describes such experiences with unadorned prose that conveys a startling specificity. As an anxious child, she would bite her nails “and line up the white slivers in the groove of the pencil holder, pretending my nails were sails for boats that would take me away.” After her double mastectomy, she imagined what would happen if she went jogging and her silicone implants burst out of her skin: “I saw myself stooping to collect the slippery implants, and quickly dusting off the black pebbles from the track before anyone saw.”

Her father, an ophthalmologist, was so preoccupied with external dangers to his loved ones’ eyesight (Grace learned to respect “the raw power of drinking straws, metal clothes hangers, baseballs, pencils and tree branches”) that he missed the signs that a young granddaughter, Grace’s niece, was developing a retinoblastoma — a cancer of the eye. His misplaced vigilance was also what led him to miss the signs that his own daughter was being abused inside the family home.

“Our house was American on the outside, but Filipino on the inside,” Talusan recalls. It was supposed to be a haven; a place where she could remove the mask that she had worn all day, as one of the few girls of color in her school. Decades later, when she temporarily moved with her husband to the Philippines for a fellowship, she wondered if returning to the land of her birth, a place where she could blend into the crowd, would alleviate the sense of loss that seemed to follow her wherever she went.

But even though she lived in a cosseted part of Manila, in a neighborhood with a Starbucks and a Lamborghini dealership, she knew that the poor were hauling garbage and scrounging for food on the other side of the wall. Visiting an orphanage, she met a teenage girl who had been found in a cemetery, having survived for years on the oranges and pastries that mourners left on the gravestones, in honor of the dead. “Every day here,” Talusan writes, “I am offended.”

Such commentary, while righteous and earned, is not the point of this indelible book. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion. She writes about her father with tenderness and empathy, recalling how he used to earn extra money in the Philippines by making prosthetic eyes that he boiled in a stockpot filled with water. “He thought it was beautiful, how the eyes bobbed and floated and rolled over — all those eyes that couldn’t see.”

Illustrated. 255 pages. Restless Books. $22.99.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d8b6968b-0772-45d9-9b6d-2fe91a345bdd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review-body-papers-memoir-grace-talusan.html">The New York Times</a>.

Documenting undocumented lives in 'The Body Papers'

(Books of The Times): As a Filipino child growing up in a small Massachusetts town, Grace Talusan felt both scrutinized and unseen. Having arrived from the Philippines when she was 2, she rehearsed a Boston accent and prayed for a metamorphosis, pleading with God to turn her into a white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Avid readers of Robert Caro may greet his new book, “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing,” with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. On the one hand: Another Caro book, and it’s not a biography! On the other hand: Another Caro book — and it’s not a biography?

Considering that the 83-year-old averages a book a decade, his fans might wonder whether “Working” will reset the clock that started in 2012, when the fourth book of his multivolume magnum opus, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” was published.

No need to worry, although this assemblage of personal reflections and interviews may give the true Caro completist a creeping sense of déjà vu. Much of the material was either published before or distilled from stories Caro has recounted elsewhere, and the book reads as if it were designed to divert as little of his time as possible. (Caro says he has a “full-scale memoir” planned, to be completed after the next Johnson volume, although at his age, he says, he can also “do the math.”) Small and charming at about 200 pages, a quick spritz instead of a deep dive, “Working” is like the antithesis of Caro’s labor-intensive oeuvre, making it strangely reassuring proof that he is, well, working.

The next Johnson book will be “the fifth of a projected three volumes,” he writes, declining to get into specifics (“My writing seems never to come out well if I’ve talked about it beforehand”) while promising that it will be the final installment. That means it will have to cover, among other things, the presidential election of 1964; Johnson’s Great Society programs and his continuing feud with Bobby Kennedy; the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the decision not to run for re-election in 1968; Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Bobby Kennedy’s assassination; and Johnson’s post-presidency life until his death in 1973.

Not to mention the escalation of the war in Vietnam, a subject about which “the LBJ Library is opening up new files all the time.” It sounds like biography writing as Zeno’s paradox — getting infinitesimally closer to the end without ever reaching it.

Caro, though, wouldn’t have it any other way. His research methods are deservedly legendary. He and his wife, Ina, pore through archival documents with a determination to “turn every page.” He tracks down as many people to talk to as he can, counting 522 interviews for “The Power Broker,” his landmark biography of Robert Moses, and “thousands” for the Johnson books.

But these standard techniques are just a start. He and Ina moved from their home in New York to the Texas Hill Country in 1978, living there for three years to better understand Johnson’s childhood. (To get the local women to warm to her and open up about what their lives were like before Johnson brought electricity to the region in the ’30s and ’40s, Ina taught herself how to make fig preserves.) Caro has said he wants to spend time in Vietnam to get a sense of what it felt like “to fight in the jungle.”

All of this painstaking work takes time. The writing itself comes quickly and easily — so much so that critic R.P. Blackmur, who taught Caro at Princeton, admonished him to “stop thinking with your fingers.” The prose in Caro’s biographies is a mesmerizing combination of fine-grained, meticulous detail recounted in lush, incantatory sentences; he is, as he says repeatedly in “Working,” always trying to accumulate enough material to “show” rather than to tell — “to make readers not only see but understand and feel” the consequences of power.

Because power, Caro says, is his real subject. He doesn’t think of his books as biographies in the conventional sense. “From the very start,” he writes, “I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times.” Robert Moses was an unelected bureaucrat whose public works projects transformed the skyline and shorelines of New York City; Lyndon Johnson was a ruthless opportunist and an astonishingly effective legislator who transformed the country’s social landscape. These were men who channeled power, wielded it, embodied it.

Caro talks a lot about power in “Working.” It can corrupt, yes, but not always. “Once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it,” he says. “What power always does is reveal.”

It’s a memorable line, from an interview Caro gave to The Paris Review in 2016. It appears not only in “Working” but also in “Master of the Senate,” the third of the Johnson books, published in 2002. There are a number of anecdotes in “Working” that Caro has shared before — after all, his books are so comprehensive that it only makes sense for, say, “Means of Ascent,” the second book in the Johnson series, to include a section on how Caro tracked down Luis Salas, a former voting official who confessed to helping Johnson steal the 1948 Senate election.

The version of the Salas story that Caro includes in “Working” is presented as an example of what Caro calls “something in my nature” — “the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete.”

This is awfully windy — where is Blackmur when you need him? Caro makes the same point more succinctly when writing about “The Power Broker,” recalling how he was swept away by the scandalous material he was discovering and an accompanying sense of duty. “I just couldn’t write the book about the great highway builder — couldn’t outline it, even — without showing the human cost of what he had done,” he writes. “There really was no choice involved.”

For someone so interested in the power of others, Caro seems coy about his own power to shape legacies. The writer who emerges from these pages is so humble as to be self-effacing — a quality that makes his halting bids at introspection, for all their genial appeal, seem mostly denuded of the drama that normally fuels Caro’s work.

But then the stubborn willingness to keep digging, to rescue secrets from oblivion, is a form of power, too. Recalling why Moses finally relented and agreed to talk to him, Caro writes: “At last someone had come along who was going to write the book whether he cooperated or not.”

‘Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/books/review-working-robert-caro.html" id="f8c51f3d-d22b-3c9f-ae35-382a3558a5fe">The New York Times</a>.

In 'Working,' Robert Caro Gives Us a Brief Look at the Process of Writing His Epic Books

The dainty slippers pictured on the cover of “Women’s Work” may have been a marketing ploy on the part of the publisher, but the image is so precious, so trite and so likely to backfire that it deserves extra points for sheer perversity. Anyone who picks up Megan K. Stack’s new book anticipating a gentle meditation on domestic life will be swiftly disabused within the first 20 pages, when Stack describes in (legitimately) excruciating detail her experience of going into labor with her first child. “I distinctly felt my hip bones dragging themselves apart,” she writes. “My skeleton was being dismantled.”

Stack, formerly a war correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, left her plum journalism job in 2011, full of expectation for the child she was about to have and the second book she planned to write. “I imagined long, silent afternoons in spotless rooms, typing clean lines of prose while the baby napped beatifically in a sunbeam,” she recalls.

Needless to say, life as a new parent wasn’t so obliging — even if she and her husband, Tom, a journalist himself, could easily afford to outsource most of the domestic work in Beijing, where they lived. They hired a woman to watch their son and clean the house and cook the meals; a few years later, when Stack was pregnant with their second child and the family moved to New Delhi for Tom’s job, they employed two women at once to do the same things.

Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but “Women’s Work” dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible. It brought to mind “My Hollywood,” Mona Simpson’s excellent novel about the knotty bond between a composer and the Filipina caregiver she hires. As Stack herself admits — in an author’s note that’s as ruthlessly and relentlessly self-aware as the rest of her book — she had little in common with the women she employed. “They were poor women, brown women, migrant women,” she writes. “And at first I pushed them to the edge of thought. They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free.”

In Beijing she hired Xiao Li, or “Little Li,” who had left her own daughter behind in the care of grandparents because she couldn’t afford child care. Later, in Delhi, Stack hired Mary and Pooja, women from the mountainous region between Bhutan and Nepal who had also left their children in the care of relatives. Soon Stack became privy to their private lives, including pregnancies, abortions, binge drinking and domestic abuse. Whatever boundaries she may have tried to erect between herself and the women in her employ began to dissolve as she learned what it meant to have a home that was also, as she puts it, “a job site.”

There’s something jarring in this blunt phrasing — perhaps because the bubble of moneyed parenthood tends to be written about in tones of such woolly sentimentality or strenuous zaniness that the reminder of a brute economic fact can feel like an intrusion. Stack writes sharp, pointed sentences that flash with dark insight. “Why was it that, whatever you desired, you could find a poor woman to sell it?” she asks, putting baby-sitting on a continuum with pornography. While living in India, she visited China and met Xiao Li’s daughter — “the girl whose rightful allotment of nurturing care I had rented.”

Stack clearly doesn’t look saintly in her own account, though she’s so attuned to her own ambivalence and complicity that she doesn’t look quite villainous either; she seems overwhelmed by new motherhood, trying to maintain a sense of human decency while also acknowledging the fundamental indecency that allows her to afford a retinue.

When Stack allowed Xiao Li to return home to tend to her sick daughter, she congratulated herself “for being superior to those other, nefarious bosses” before interrogating Xiao Li in a way that made clear that Stack wasn’t so superior after all. In Delhi, Stack would sometimes try to step back and listen to the conversations she was having with Tom as if she were eavesdropping “on a couple discussing their servants,” she writes. “It was a disgusting sensation.”

Tom, though — Tom looks bad. He isn’t cruel to Stack. He wants her to write. He wants her to have help so that she can write — hired help, that is, because as much as he’s a “picky eater” and a “neat freak” (her words), he’s too busy with his job to lift up a mop or a saucepan. In Stack’s memoir — and it’s entirely possible that Real Tom has much more to commend him than Memoir Tom — he carries himself like a comfortable neoliberal patriarch, apparently unbothered by the economic forces that have allowed his family to wield so much power over their employees’ lives.

“So fire her,” he told Stack at one point, when she explained that she wasn’t getting much writing done while Xiao Li was away, tending to her daughter. “We are not a welfare state.”

The harsh lines in Stack’s portrait of Tom soften a bit when the family is in Delhi: He magnanimously insists on clean water delivery to Pooja in the servants’ quarters; he graciously offers Pooja an air conditioner. But his noblesse oblige only seems to kick in when he’s flush with good feelings toward an employee — which simply serves to underscore that such modest gestures are his to bestow or withhold.

Stack includes an epigraph from Adrienne Rich: “The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.” “Women’s Work” is so full of keen insights and shrewd observations that by the time Stack arrived at her What Needs to Be Done moment, a mere six pages from the end, she had already won me over so fully that I was only mildly exasperated when she landed on this: “The answer is the men.”

It is? Men, she says, have to do more of the housework and child care. Sure, yes, of course. But from the sound of it, running a bourgeois household to her family’s exacting specifications will necessarily consume more work than two people are able to give (especially if one of those people is Memoir Tom). Her wan conclusion to an otherwise fearless book feels like a bit of a put-on and a bit of a cop-out. And you don’t have to take it from me — you can take it from her. “When at last I have nothing to lose,” Stack writes, “it will be safe to think honestly.”

‘Women’s Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/books/review-womens-work-megan-stack.html" id="19979218-9971-35e7-af3b-68f3d0803c7e">The New York Times</a>.

Domestic Confidential: What Happens When a New Mother's Home Becomes a 'Job Site'

“Have you ever heard of Hattiesburg, Mississippi?” it began. Lelyveld checked “yes.” He proceeded to the next question: “If yes, in what context?” “My father was beaten there with a tire iron in the summer of 1964,” he wrote.

Lelyveld’s father, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, had traveled to Hattiesburg as part of the Freedom Summer drive to register black voters. The kind of racist violence that resulted in an image of the bleeding Rabbi Lelyveld transmitted across the news wires “was as old as Hattiesburg itself,” historian William Sturkey writes in “Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.”

By 1964, though, something was changing. “The old tactics,” Sturkey notes, “were losing their edge.” Brutality had long been deployed by white supremacists as a weapon and warning, but now, instead of stifling morale among Hattiesburg’s black residents and civil rights activists, it was strengthening their resolve.

Sturkey’s book is a study in unintended consequences — a portrait of a Mississippi town from its founding in 1882 through the depredations of racial apartheid, ending with a brief coda on the civil rights movement. The close-up view affords us the chance to learn how segregation operated on the most intimate level, in the everyday experiences of Hattiesburg’s residents. The personal histories of black and white townspeople are recounted in alternating chapters, showing the unexpected points at which they diverge and intersect — all the better to understand what historian C. Vann Woodward called “the strange career of Jim Crow.”

Sturkey, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursues two main threads in this illuminating book. The first has to do with black agency: By highlighting the perspectives and actions of black Hattiesburgers, he shows the variety of ways in which they responded to the grim reality of segregation by resisting or escaping or otherwise trying to make do. The second has to do with the town’s white power brokers, who sought to maintain an unyielding, repressive racial order while also navigating a fluctuating economic one. In responding to a new economic reality, Sturkey says, some of the town’s ardent segregationists, despite their most ruthless efforts, inadvertently opened the door to Jim Crow’s undoing.

“As they were in real life,” he writes, “the fortunes of the oppressors and the oppressed in this book are at once separate and intractably bound.”

Hattiesburg became known as a hub for the railroads and the lumber industry; located in the thick of Mississippi’s Piney Woods, about 70 miles north of the Gulf Coast, the town was a draw for new residents seeking their fortune. But William Hardy, the Confederate veteran who founded Hattiesburg and named it after his wife, couldn’t realize his vision for an economic powerhouse without the help of Yankee money — an issue that would come up again and again in the so-called New South. “The former Confederacy,” Sturkey writes, “was broke.”

This dependency on outside investment becomes a running theme in the book. At various points in the town’s history, its white business leaders tried to square a stubborn desire for economic growth with a stubborn commitment to bigotry.

Sometimes they succeeded in having it both ways, forcing Northern-based businesses to abide by local “customs,” regardless of any moral qualms (which may or may not have worried Northern businessmen) or economic inefficiencies (which most certainly did). In 1933, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce persuaded Reliance Manufacturing, a Chicago-based company, to build a factory in town. The chamber’s representatives were elated. One of them told the audience gathered for the plant’s opening that the building was “an expression of your humanity” — even though, as Sturkey points out, “only white people were allowed to work there.”

But material self-interest wasn’t always so compatible with the voracious demands of Jim Crow. During the depths of the Great Depression, with Hattiesburg relying on charitable donations to feed people, the mayor issued an ultimatum to the Red Cross: Forgo its nondiscrimination policy and stop serving African-Americans, or else vacate its offices at City Hall. (The Red Cross refused and was kicked out.) The Philadelphia Tribune was mildly incredulous at the audacious display of brinkmanship: “Even the gnawing pains of hunger are unable to make the white people of that God-forsaken section forget their white supremacy.”

One imagines that Hattiesburg’s black residents were less surprised — they had been contending with some of the most destructive manifestations of racism for their entire lives. Sturkey traces the story of Turner Smith, who moved with his wife, Mamie, and their children to Hattiesburg in 1900. Turner was born into slavery and emancipated as a toddler; even though he and Mamie were both trained as teachers, post-Reconstruction Mississippi continually cut funding to black schools, so Turner worked as a carpenter and Mamie as a laundress.

Some black Hattiesburgers used their earnings to move north as part of the Great Migration; an exodus to Chicago during the early part of the 20th century took with it roughly half the town’s black population, leading some desperate white business owners to beg their black workers to stay. Other white proprietors tried scare tactics, warning of Chicago’s supposedly deadly cold. “Well I, for one, am glad that they had the privilege of dying a natural death,” one migrant said. “That is much better than the rope and torch.”

Any gains in black mobility and financial independence were fragile, vulnerable to a racial hierarchy that asserted its authority in cruel, capricious ways. But even modest and precarious improvements, Sturkey argues, were nevertheless real. Four of Turner and Mamie’s sons became doctors; one owned a pharmacy in town and held NAACP meetings in the back room.

Sturkey’s cleareyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

When describing a voter-registration drive that resulted in ostensible failure — the county registrar refused to register the applicants, but their efforts created a useful paper trail — Sturkey explains the necessity of such incremental and painstaking work: “Every attempt mattered. Each added to the total.”

— Production notes: "Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White" by William Sturkey, Illustrated. 442 pages. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95.

This article originally appeared in <a id="28394b21-309e-4ae6-8443-becaef6777a0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/books/review-hattiesburg-william-sturkey.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jim Crow told through the lives, black and white, of one Mississippi town

(Books of The Times): In his memoir “Omaha Blues,” Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The Times, recalled getting a survey in the mail.

“Who is Gómez? Nobody knows.”

The person who issued this cryptic statement was none other than Gómez himself — Leonel Gómez Vides, a coffee farmer from El Salvador who showed up in Southern California on the doorstep of poet Carolyn Forché in 1977, with a bundle of papers under his arm and his two young daughters in tow. Within a few days he persuaded Forché to make her first trip to El Salvador, just as the country was on the verge of civil war.

In “What You Have Heard Is True,” Forché traces how this initial encounter with a stranger irrevocably changed the course of her art and her life. Forché was 27 at the time, a Midwesterner living in San Diego, with a budding reputation for her work. She had heard Gómez’s name before, when she traveled to Spain to translate the poems of his cousin Claribel Alegría, though nobody could say for sure whether Claribel’s cousin was working with the Salvadoran guerrillas or with the CIA.

Until the publication of this memoir, Forché's experiences in El Salvador — seven “extended stays” between 1978 and 1980 — have mostly stayed distilled in her poetry. “The Colonel,” collected in “The Country Between Us” (1981), begins with an elegant dinner at a colonel’s home (rack of lamb, green mangoes) and ends with him emptying a grocery sack full of human ears onto the table — ghastly trophies from a dirty war.

Taking its title from the first line of that poem, Forché's memoir starts off slowly, as she describes in minute detail how she made the fateful and seemingly inexplicable decision to follow a mysterious stranger’s directive to take such a perilous trip. But once Forché's story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go. “What You Have Heard Is True” is billed, per its subtitle, as “a memoir of witness and resistance.” That’s fair enough, but it does this riveting book a mild disservice; the memoir I read was more intricate and surprising than such an earnest descriptor lets on.

For a while, it isn’t at all clear how much Gómez can be trusted. When he first shows up, he draws Forché pictures of Spanish galleons, explains how the conquistadors brutalized the Indians, and uses a toothpick holder and a saltshaker to dramatize the infighting among Salvadoran officers after nearly 50 years of a military dictatorship. He offers grisly disquisitions on the death squads, on the disappeared, on body parts washing up on the beach. Forché tells him that he would be better off enlisting a journalist to document what is happening in his country. “I want a poet,” he insists. “Why do you think I came all this way?”

Once Forché arrives in El Salvador, Gómez drives her around in his white Toyota Hiace, constantly glancing in the rearview mirror, a handgun tucked into a copy of Time magazine between them. He takes her to the countryside to meet with peasant farmers, or campesinos, who don’t have enough to eat. He takes her to the U.S. embassy, where the ambassador warns her against Gómez because “we don’t know who he is.” Gómez even takes her to El Salvador’s military headquarters, where he talks candidly to a lieutenant colonel about how all the disappearances are making the army look bad — before he asks whether he might use the lieutenant colonel’s shower.

The whole thing comes across as baffling — much as it does to Forché herself, at least at first. We gradually become acquainted with Gómez and his country through Forché's eyes, as she starts off knowing almost nothing, then learns a little bit, and then a little bit more. Gómez is incensed by the abject poverty in most of his country, where campesinos live in huts made of mud and junkyard scraps. “If the Salvadoran campesinos fight,” he says, “they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another 200 years.”

But he’s also a landowner. He’s against corruption and in favor of reform, yet he claims “no doctrinal allegiances.” His copy of Machiavelli has been thumbed through so many times that it’s held together with a rubber band. When Forché remarks on the Che Guevara poster in his home, he says: ‘Yes, well, I have posters of Mussolini too, if the need arises.”

She realizes that what Gómez calls his “symphony of illusion” — “He talks to this one. He talks to that one.” — turns out to be the only way for him to help reformist efforts against a murderous regime while trying, as much as he can, to protect himself.

“Terror is the given of the place,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1983 book “Salvador.” Forché describes being chased by death squads — not once, but twice. The killings become so indiscriminate that she grows familiar with the “rotting, sweet, sickening” smell of dead bodies left by the side of the road. An excerpt from the unpunctuated notes she took at the time — scribbled in pencil, “to keep the writing light and erasable” — captures how corpses were mutilated into instruments of intimidation: “When mere death no longer instills fear in the population the stakes must be raised the people must be made to see that not only will they die but die slowly and brutally.”

Behind most of the killings during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war were government forces, which were in turn bolstered by American money and American training. Forché alludes to the political context in the book, but the shape of her memoir hews closely to what she herself saw and heard — and how, out of the horror, she began to discern what she needed to do.

Forché returned to the United States to write what she called “a poetry of witness” (“born to an island of greed / and grace where you have this sense / of yourself as apart from others”), married a war photographer, had a child. “You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see,” Gómez said, but he left it up to Forché to figure out the rest for herself. “I do not have your answers,” he told her. “I am just a man.”

A Memoir of Witness and Resistance”

Illustrated. 390 pages. Penguin Press. $28.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ced25699-dc6d-4db0-acdc-42886e9df57e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/books/review-what-you-have-heard-is-true-carolyn-forche.html">The New York Times</a>.

A poet remembers her impulsive trip into a civil war

In “What You Have Heard Is True,” Forché traces how this initial encounter with a stranger irrevocably changed the course of her art and her life. Forché was 27 at the time, a Midwesterner living in San Diego, with a budding reputation for her work. She had heard Gómez’s name before, when she traveled to Mallorca to translate the poems of his cousin Claribel Alegría, though nobody could say for sure whether Claribel’s cousin was working with the Salvadoran guerrillas or with the CIA.

Taking its title from the first line of that poem, Forché’s memoir starts off slowly, as she describes in minute detail how she made the fateful and seemingly inexplicable decision to follow a mysterious stranger’s directive to take such a perilous trip. But once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go. “What You Have Heard Is True” is billed, per its subtitle, as “a memoir of witness and resistance.” That’s fair enough, but it does this riveting book a mild disservice; the memoir I read was more intricate and surprising than such an earnest descriptor lets on.

The whole thing comes across as baffling — much as it does to Forché herself, at least at first. We gradually become acquainted with Gómez and his country through Forché’s eyes, as she starts off knowing almost nothing, then learns a little bit, and then a little bit more. Gómez is incensed by the abject poverty in most of his country, where campesinos live in huts made of mud and junkyard scraps. “If the Salvadoran campesinos fight,” he says, “they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another 200 years.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/books/review-what-you-have-heard-is-true-carolyn-forche.html" id="8da1a63a-1249-33fb-aed8-66845b8d0359">The New York Times</a>.

A Poet Remembers Her Impulsive Trip Into a Civil War

In wartime, no strategy is off the table, and militant feminist Andrea Dworkin was fighting a war — one she didn’t choose, she said, but one that the patriarchy had foisted on her. She was determined to show how women could never be free as long as they lived in a world that was structured by men’s ambitions, men’s needs, men’s desires.

Dworkin, who died in 2005 at 58, knew that in fighting this battle she would confront the problem that any woman faced whenever it was a case of her word against his: how to be believed. Being conciliatory and ingratiating, submitting oneself as sweet and quiet and ultimately harmless — those were precisely the kinds of tactics with which an individual woman, conditioned to survive on men’s terms, might obtain a reprieve but not respect.

So Dworkin decided early on to take a page from the enemy’s playbook. “My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman-hating itself — smarter, deeper, colder,” she wrote in a 1995 essay. “I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography.”

The hallmarks of Dworkin’s writing are all there: the confident strut; the incantatory repetition; the startling, belligerent language; the ruthless whittling down of options to a single, irrevocable point (“my only chance”). This was someone who thought deeply and read widely and was preoccupied with questions not only of justice but also of style. “Last Days at Hot Slit,” a new anthology of Dworkin’s work, shows that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she actually wrote.

The editors, Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, present a chronological selection from Dworkin’s books, essays, novels and unpublished fragments, making it clear that her “restless output,” as Fateman puts it in her excellent introduction, amounted to much more than saying that all sex is rape. Dworkin herself never wrote that, though she did deem a common sex act tantamount to colonialism: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally.” Her verdict on pornography was even more extreme, equating fantasies of domination and submission with a fascist wish-fulfillment — “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.”

Such categorical edicts were what Dworkin became known (and lampooned) for, though they also happened to be the least interesting aspect of her work. A new generation of feminists have reclaimed her, seeing in Dworkin’s incandescent rage a source of illumination, even as they bristle at some of her specific views. As Moira Donegan states it succinctly in a recent essay for Bookforum, Dworkin’s “inflexible opinions” on pornography and sex work have “fallen dramatically out of fashion;” Rebecca Traister, who cites Dworkin as an inspiration in her book “Good and Mad,” says the same. The Times columnist Michelle Goldberg suggests that Dworkin’s adamant refusal to seek approval from men expands the terms of a circumscribed discussion: “To treat her writing with curiosity and respect is itself a way of demonstrating indifference to male opinion.”

Dworkin composed her work from a personal place, but she didn’t contain her experience in anecdote; she extrapolated, she deduced, she pronounced. She wrote as a woman, as a child who was molested by a stranger, as a battered wife. “I used my life in every decision I made,” she explained of her process. “It was my compass.”

She described the experience of domestic assault as “being buried alive,” channeling this sensation into her work, lending it a certain airlessness but also infusing it with an existential urgency. The women’s movement in Dworkin’s unyielding universe was no mere lifestyle choice; it was a matter of life and death. “The clarity of the survivor is chilling,” she wrote. “She sees through the social strategies that have controlled her as a woman.”

Her own clarity meant that she was finding connections everywhere, moving with inexorable determination as she methodically built her case against the monstrous order of things. “Now, I have laid out the dimensions of the rape atrocity,” she states on one page, before delivering an indictment of “the dating system” on the next. Instead of the word “sign,” with its soft, vague connotations, she was inordinately fond of the word “signet,” with all the official sanction it implied.

To make fine distinctions was to evade responsibility and, in her stark moral universe, commensurate with complicity. In 1983, addressing an audience of left-wing men, she pointedly asked: “Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those.”

In her book “Pornography,” she was especially scathing on progressive men who linked sexual libertinism with women’s emancipation, seeing them as no better than conquistadors in hipster attire. (Two decades after her marriage ended, she described her abusive ex-husband as “the former flower child I am still too afraid to name.”) For all their critiques of capitalism, these men seemed remarkably untroubled when the commodity was women. “The dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce,” she wrote, in one of her typically cutting asides.

Dworkin published two novels — “Ice and Fire” (1986) and “Mercy” (1990) — that are excerpted here; written in wildly divergent styles, they covered overlapping autobiographical ground. After all, if male novelists could return to the same subject over and over again, why couldn’t she? “Mercy” includes a darkly funny list of alternative (and unprintable) titles of famous books by famous men: “They just never seem to get over the miracle that it’s them in a big man’s body doing all the damage; Look, ma, it’s me. Volume Twelve.”

In her first book, “Woman Hating” (whose original working title was “Last Days at Hot Slit”), Dworkin appended an afterword titled “The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle,” a river of lowercase text in which she decried her publisher for filling the previous pages with “garbage: standard punctuation.”

It’s so over-the-top that at first it seems like a lark — or, since this is Dworkin, just another example of her resolve to see oppression everywhere. Soon, though, it turns into a more searching exploration of what her confrontational approach might challenge her readers to do. “Not to think about different things,” she writes, “but to think in different ways.”

‘Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin’

Dworkin, who died in 2005 at 58, knew that in fighting this battle she would confront the problem that any woman faced whenever it was a case of her word against his

Jennifer Szalai

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