Seven years ago, when Tess Gunty began to write her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch,” she was 23, living in New York and experiencing a constant barrage of catcalls when she walked down the street.
She felt, she says, “like a deer living in hunting grounds.” As if her flesh didn’t belong to her. To cope, she would dissociate. “I started to feel this sort of alienation from my body,” says Gunty, now 29. “I started to feel like I had to leave my body in order to get to my next destination.”
The moon has a reputation for “magnificent desolation,” as Buzz Aldrin said when he stepped onto the surface more than 50 years ago. It has no atmosphere to speak of, and no protection from a constant stream of radiation, whether from the sun or deep space. During a lunar day, about as long as 15 of our own, nonstop sunlight makes the surface hot enough to boil water. A lunar night lasts just as long, only it’s unfathomably cold.
Yet hidden in this bleak picture are a select few places that might offer some respite from all those inhospitable conditions. And one particular spot that sounds almost … pleasant?
Everybody is like that in a way. Everybody is grabbing from the world bits and pieces of thought and fashion that they can mishmash into their own personal way of being. The more sources you borrow from, the more interesting your self is likely to be.
The other day, I used a Russian search engine to reverse image search my face, revealing hundreds of women with shaggy blond hair and bangs, women with white faces and blunt chins. I was curious if I’d recognize any of them as being my exact match, my true doppelgänger. I found a few that made me pause, but no one was close enough. There was no thrill of discovery, no warm feelings of belonging. I had hoped for more, for some evidence that my face is out there, living and breathing, moving through some city I’ve never visited, kissing people I have never met, maybe even smoking a brand of cigarettes I’ve never smoked. I wanted there to be someone who, despite looking just like me, isn’t.
What differentiates “Death Doesn’t Forget” is its sense not of despair but of equanimity. The future is unwritten, in other words; it must be lived to be revealed. Even as the novel reaches its conclusion, Lin leaves open a number of questions about what will happen, what the characters will choose. In part, this is a convention of the series, since everyone must live to animate another book. But that’s too reductive for what Lin has done here, which is to write a crime novel as a slice of life.
It's a big, beautifully written novel about an underexplored topic, that succeeds in being both serious art and immersive entertainment.
Given the title of her memoir — “A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman” — a reader might expect to be immersed solely in a scientific story: how a geologist progressed over the years from hammering terrestrial rocks as a student to leading a deep-space mission. But this riveting book, beautifully written, is far more. With a brave candor, Elkins-Tanton examines all aspects of her experiences — personal and professional, the good and the bad — to plumb the very meaning of her life. She also offers novel approaches to education, tactics for handling sexual harassment cases in academia and new methods for team-building in scientific research that go beyond the “hero model.” “No single person can alone build human knowledge anymore,” she notes. “We need the breadth of ideas that comes from a diversity of voices.”
James Belich’s new book, “The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe,” shows the depth and longevity of the controversy over the sources and impacts of an era-defining scourge. Belich, an Oxford University historian, suggests that what is now known as the Black Death was so consequential that its effects equal those of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Renaissance. It’s a staggering implication, but he makes a decent case for it in this bold, tremendously researched work. From illustrating the plague’s effects globally to showing how central it was to Europe’s ascension, Belich demonstrates that the medieval pandemic influenced many aspects of human life.