In the autumn of 2017, about 250 walruses in Russia, having climbed up to rocky slopes overlooking a beach, just walked over the edge.
Usually, gravity is no enemy of the walrus. When these animals encounter hard surfaces, they rise up to meet them, hauling their two-ton bulks onto floating pieces of ice. When they fall, they flop off those low platforms into the accommodating water. So you might imagine that a walrus, peering off a tall cliff, doesn’t really understand what will happen to it when it steps off. It doesn’t expect to plummet for 260 feet, cartwheel through the air, bounce off the rocks, and crash abruptly. Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not walrus-associated verbs.
Ask a New Yorker about their opinion regarding trains and you will likely get an earful about the sputtering subway system or the less-than-reliable commuter rail lines that stretch into the suburbs.
But few New Yorkers have ever glimpsed, or even heard of, the New York & Atlantic Railway, a freight train that would seem more familiar rumbling across the Great Plains, not chugging through crowded city neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, bearing cars loaded with food, scrap metal, construction materials and even beer.
Now the little-known railroad’s profile is about to get much bigger.
Lisa See, like the waves of the ocean, lulls readers into a state of hypnotic ease as she teaches them the ways of Young-sook’s matriarchal home town. She is a master of portraying the intricate details of life on the island, describing Jeju with such precision that readers find themselves fully immersed in Young-sook’s world. Perhaps even more astounding is the skill with which See encourages readers to forge deep emotional investments in each character, breaking readers’ hearts and urging tears with each shocking turn of events.
The Old Drift offers a view of human history characterized by generative mistakes, from Dr Livingstone's fatal calculation about the source of the Nile to evolution itself: "Don't forget evolution forged the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake ..." To err is human, we hear again and again. But the second half of that maxim, the part about forgiveness, isn't mentioned. You get the sense it might be beside the point to Serpell's youngest generation of characters, with their scalding assessments of injustice and cruelty by those in power. They're not here to forgive. They're here for the revolution.
The study of criminal justice is the study of power, and as a veteran legal journalist, Bazelon has long been concerned with this theme. Her last book, “Sticks and Stones,” explored the culture of bullying and painted a nuanced portrait, rejecting a simple dichotomy between blameworthy bullies and innocent victims. “Charged” is considerably less balanced — in, say, its discussion of plea-bargaining, which Bazelon (convincingly) asserts is used to excess without sufficiently acknowledging its necessary role in the system, or of pro-prosecutor rulings by the Supreme Court, which she analyzes almost entirely from a public-policy perspective with little focus on their legal reasoning. This could cause readers who do not share Bazelon’s politics to dismiss her core argument. But to the extent that it’s a polemic, “Charged” reflects its author’s passion for her subject. “As a journalist,” she writes, “I’ve never felt a greater sense of urgency about exposing the roots of a problem and shining a light on the people working to solve it.”
A particular light in February,
singular in the sheen of ice upon the hill,
the ground cover grain or rayless yellow,
was sent to me in a photograph by someone thinking of me then,
a man walking in hills, I occurred to him, I