Amazon’s online store has surpassed Walmart, making it the largest retailer outside China. By delivering essentials and luxuries to those stuck at home during the pandemic, it helped many people navigate a bleak moment. Shipping times that used to be measured in days are now counted in hours. It is one of the few companies valued at more than a trillion dollars.
For all that success, however, Amazon is under pressure from many directions.
I am privileged to say I haven’t faced too much fear in my real life. I had a very stable upbringing, loving parents shielding me from any sort of true, desperate want. There has been one consistently tricky obstacle, though, a certain monster that I have battled with time and time again. And with irony so deliciously absurd it would fit neatly into ancient mythology, it’s something that requires me to stay alive. Food. Food has been my greatest source of fear.
Sure, buffets aren’t considered fine dining by any means, but eating from one meant more to me than just observing hot curries sizzling in tin trays under heating lamps. Buffets represent an amalgamation of the American dream, along with its promises of variety and free choice. The mostly-family owned establishments who offered buffet options were opening a window into their culinary world to a range of eaters—from the timid to the adventurous—providing a chance to explore and experiment without intimidation. For myself, eating at an Indian buffet was my chance to connect with half of my ethnic heritage while also enlightening new friends and family to the dishes of my father’s side.
On the marsh-bound causeway to Chincoteague Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, cars and their drivers seemed to float across the still waters of Queens Sound. As I made my way across, I thought of how, in centuries past, skiffs drifted through the region’s bays, channels and coves in search of shellfish. Back then, before fish-farming became popular, the land itself functioned as a sort of natural pier for its residents who wrangled clams and oysters and terrapin, as thick as treasure, from beds in the brackish water.
Lisa Harding’s second novel, “Bright Burning Things” is moving — humane and emotionally scrubbed raw — as a depiction of Sonya’s journey to the bottom of the bottle and (after her father’s intervention) her desperate efforts to claw her way back to sobriety to regain her life.
Whether by disposition or by strategy, Greta Garbo was the most elusive of movie stars. In the 80 years since she gave her final performance, “I want to be alone” (a line she spoke in “Grand Hotel”) has become the thing for which she is best remembered — more than her talent, probably more than her beauty and certainly more than her movies, of which even a lot of cinephiles would have trouble naming five. Her professional legacy is lean: Even the two famous slogans associated with her — “Garbo Talks!” for her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” and “Garbo Laughs” for her most enduring (let’s just say best), Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka” — herald deviations from the norm. This is not the Garbo you know, they say: the silent Garbo, the unsmiling Garbo, the enigmatic Garbo. Impenetrability is an odd quality for a performer to make her signature.
So it’s fitting that “Garbo,” Robert Gottlieb’s ardent and wise investigative portrait, sometimes reads less as a methodical account of a life than as a biography-mystery, a hunt for a quarry that the author, a veteran editor/writer/obsesser/pursuer who ran (at different times) Knopf and The New Yorker, understands is likely to remain just out of reach.