The opening D-day sequence of “Saving Private Ryan” and the climactic mad dash of “1917” are rightly praised for their authentically rendered brutality. But the chaos is typically part of a larger narrative designed to provide reassurance that war delivers victory and a sense of order: The soldier is rescued, the battlefield directive is successfully fulfilled. In that light, those “gritty” and “authentic” war films may be more of a guilty pleasure than any MCU spectacle.
This paradox is Thomson’s central concern throughout the book, but that doesn’t mean “The Fatal Alliance” is a book-length guilt trip. Thomson deeply admires many entries in the genre — he notes he’s watched “Black Hawk Down” six times — and has a keen eye for moments that undermine its more propagandistic conventions. But he’s also persistently, thoughtfully questioning what filmmakers intend, what conversations they’re accidentally stepping into and how we as moviegoers are implicated as war-story consumers.
Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.
Time, technology and changing tastes have derailed a once profitable, unique business that at its peak sold thousands of vintage telephones to buyers from around the world and produced revenues of nearly $1 million a year.
Only now, Ron and Mary Knappen are trying to determine what to do with their vast Phoneco inventory, which draws little interest these days. It’s the same challenges faced by others who deal in antiques like roll-top desks, sets of china, oil lamps, armoires and salt and pepper shakers.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” writes Mark Twain, “because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” More than anything, Tate’s achievement is to mount a challenge to our own sense of reality, our sense of what is “normal” or expected from the world. “Some people go their whole lives / without ever writing a single poem,” Tate reminds us, but what happens in a poem is no stranger than anything else. After all, these are people “who don’t hesitate / to cut somebody’s heart or skull open,” who play golf, hunt foxes, shoplift, and invest their money, or simply “stroll into a church / as if that were a natural part of life.” “Truth is, you are // free,” writes Tate in “Consumed,” “and what might happen to you / today, nobody knows.”
A bucket of moldy jam stored in the walk-in storage closet of an L.A. cafe; famous men masturbating in front of young women; misappropriated campaign funds: Such real-life cancellation plots provide the unspoken backdrop to Lexi Freiman’s angular, careening latest, “The Book of Ayn,” which charts a writer’s undoing after she publishes an opioid crisis satire, written from a rent-free pied-à-terre with a view of the Empire State Building. This is a gamy picaresque for the age of the notes-app apology: a cutting novel of ego and its death, Freudian yearning, Randian Hollywood, scatological epiphany and the vileness of the pursuit of a career in letters.
A title like The Race to Be Myself suggests a journey of self-discovery, but Semenya never expresses doubts about her identity as a woman or an athlete. The real race she’s describing is a race against time – a race to outmanoeuvre the IAAF’s shifting criteria about whether or not, and under what terms, women with “differences of sexual development” could compete. In the case of her own career, Semenya opted to take a a potent dose of estrogen to bring her testosterone down to a level deemed acceptable by the IAAF for as long as she could. The medication had intense physical and psychological side effects, but that didn’t stop her from running – and winning, repeatedly. Other young elite athletes, subjected to gonadectomies, entirely vanished from the field.