In her new book North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac, Carolyn addresses her students directly, reminding them that this is what academia, or at least literature, can be: a platter of gifts, a realm at once generative and gentle. “Eat the mythical foods,” she writes, “discuss poetry and Greek mythology and Italian renaissance paintings, the whole world yours and all its jeweled fruits.” Graduate school opened those horizons up for us, at least in those early days, and Carolyn seemed more prepared than most to receive the instruction.
In my new book, American Childhood, wherever I could, I tried to pick pictures and artifacts that gave insight into what the child saw, to look at life through the eyes of children—that is, not the childhood as imagined by adults, nor childhood as remembered by adults looking back on their own pasts. But while that is an interesting idea to contemplate, it proved to be an impossibly neat and ultimately unrealistic filter, since in most cases, adults took the pictures I included.
Try though we might to elicit it from them, children do not have the expressive skills to communicate what they are experiencing. Actually, let me go over that again. Try though we might to elicit it from them, we adults, by being adults, have lost the special sauce that lets us see and hear and respond to the expressive gestures that children are making all the time.
Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 100 kilometers off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, created millions of years ago by intense volcanic activity. The biggest and most populated island, Tenerife, rises from the deep-ocean floor to a series of peaks, one of which is the third-largest volcano in the world. Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf. In contrast to most of the island’s stark geology, north of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz, is a long crescent-shaped beach of soft yellow sand, with groves of palm trees and a calm bay created by a long breakwater. This is Playa de las Teresitas, a magnet for northern European tourists craving winter sun.
But most of the people sunbathing on Teresitas are likely unaware of what lurks in the shallow waters lapping the shoreline. The bay—engineered and less than 10 kilometers from the Canaries’ second-largest city—is a surprising haven for pups of one of the world’s most critically endangered fish: the angelshark.
Key to the book’s success is the breadth of generational experience that Murray’s imagination seems so smoothly to inhabit. He’s convincing whether he’s writing about the sexual recklessness of a midlife crisis, awkward schoolboys hunched over their consoles or teenage girls out on the lash. And he’s also a demon plotter – tying up any number of dangled threads in a nail-biting finale centred on Dickie’s involvement with a doomsday prepper encouraging him to build an underground bunker.
There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s.
Finkelstein, a Times columnist and member of the House of Lords, isn’t trying to explain why these utopian ideologies arose. His preoccupation is on the who and how: “…how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible wave on two happy families; how it tossed them and turned them, and finally returned what was left to dry land”.