Sherbert Illuminated

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you know that a lot of nonfiction books just aren’t to my taste. Whether that’s because they try too hard to appeal to a lay audience ( The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson) or get bogged down in clumsy prose ( The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson), most of the histories I read just can’t seem to walk the tightrope that is modern nonfiction publishing. Maybe I’m just a snob. But when I find a book that manages to be both well-written and well-researched, I want to share it with the world. Anyway, guess what I found this week. As an end-of-year-assignment in my APUSH class, I have to do a research paper on a niche topic in American history. I chose to focus on German-language newspapers in Milwaukee during the First World War (WWI), and whether they changed their content to comply with the Sedition and Espionage Acts. Milwaukee in particular was viewed as suspect for its high percentage of German-Americans, who may have har

“GABRIEL: Better get ready for the judgement   Better get ready for the judgement   My Lord is coming down” (30) When my school’s wonderful tech director Ms. Lentz lent me the play Fences (thanks!), I immediately remembered the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall.” It follows two neighbors as they repair the divide between their property. While the narrator is charmed by the beauty of nature, his companion is more interested in maintaining their mutual barrier: “He only says ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘ Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense” (“Mending Wall”) In August Wilson’s most famous work, there are no cows, nor is there beautiful spring weather or wary neighbors. But Fences uses the same watchful, challenging energy to tell the

“Machiavellianism is what stands between us and Machiavelli. It gives manifest shape to what is evil in politics, it is the hideous face of all that one would like to disavow, but it’s hard to close one’s eyes to it. It is also a mask behind which the man, Niccolò Machiavelli, who was born in Florence in 1469 and died there in 1527, disappears” (19) This book has a fabulous cover, and that is about the only good part of it. Just look at it: a fuzzy, black-and-white portrait of Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, obscured by a terrace of red scribbles that, behind the learned writer’s head, suggest a bloody crown. There is no title, but everything about the cover’s design screams “biography.” So how in heck is Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People what to Fear not a biography? Well, what is a biography anyway? What is the state? What is the people? In this book, french author Patrick Boucheron answers none of these questions and less. Machiavelli is definitely supposed to b

“People say you’re supposed to put your faith in God, not men. Do you think God wants you, or anybody, to go untouched for decades and decades? For their whole lives? Like Sister Stewart, Sister Wilson, Sister Hill, my mother after my father died—all those women at church who think they have to choose between pleasing God and something so basic, so human as being held and known in the most intimate way” (10) Let’s get one thing straight: this book was not written for me. Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , is a celebration of Black women and their sexuality. I’m an asexual Catholic white girl who couldn’t be considered attractive if she had North and South poles. But I like to read, especially about religion and the individual, and one of my English let me borrow a copy of this book (thanks, Ms. Saunders!). So here I am reviewing The Secret Lives of Church Ladies ! Spoiler alert: it’s pretty darn good. The stories are unabashedly sexual, b

“GRANDMA: I’ve been writing in names that are missing, the ones I know, which is by no means all of them, That’s what happens, you see. First, there’s no need to write who they are, because everyone knows that’s Great-Aunt Sophia or Cousin Rudi, and then only some of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t remember this man with the little dog,’ and you don’t realize how fast they’re disappearing from being remembered…” (21) The works of British playwright Tom Stoppard mean a lot to me. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was the first play I’d ever read and loved, and The Invention of Love convinced me (somewhat counterintuitively) to become a translator. Stoppard’s plays teach the reader or viewer  about everything from thermodynamics to Roman love elegies. He’s the kind of artist who makes magic out of whatever’s on his mind. In his latest play, Leopoldstadt , he’s thinking about family. Born Tomas Sträussler in 1937, Stoppard fled soon-to-be-

“You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that…the books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame” (206) Only in a hypochondriac society could an “unclean” book like The Picture of Dorian Gray flourish. To middle-class Britons, the end of the century looked like the end of the world: the urban poor huddled in filthy slums, while the rich marinated in a hell of staunch nationalism and French perfume. Foreigners streamed in from every corner of the globe, while Her Majesty’s African and Asian subjects conspired to bite the hand that fed them. War loomed on every horizon.  In bookstores and magazines, tales of invasion and corruption began to appear alongside moralizing sermons and adventure stories. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shocked readers by presenting an upstanding doctor with a horrible dark side. Bram Stoker’s 1897 story Dracula revived Old World fears of pa

“Despite my years of struggling both for and with this country, I have not managed to replace it, to drive it out of me like an evil spirit that beset me. No ritual purification, no repression mechanism has yet been of any assistance. Because everywhere I went, travelling further and further from my country, I was searching for the squandered, scattered, wasted, unused love I’d left behind” (10) The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili is first and foremost a labor of love: that is, it is about love and it is a labor to read. Second, it is a work of Georgian history, written in German and longlisted for the International Booker prize in 2020 for its translation by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin. Third, it is a entry in the loose subgenre of family sagas that represents the history of a nation with a handful of quirky and tragic individuals. Each of these identities —romantic, national and literary—contributes to the character of the 930-page tome. But none is sufficient to save it fro