Since the end of World War II, no scientific animal name has caused more of a stink than has Anophthalmus hitleri, a designation that describes a rare, amber-colored carabid beetle that dwells in a few damp caves in central Slovenia.
The problem isn’t the genus name, Anophthalmus, which denotes that, like other cave beetles living in perpetual darkness, this one has no eyes. What many zoologists find appalling is the species name, hitleri, which an Austrian bug collector bestowed upon the beetle in 1937 in homage to Hitler in spite of the leader’s ruthless and racist actions, including the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, with the Holocaust still to come.
All my life, whether I was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s, going to pretty awning-laden Manhattan sports bars to watch the Aaron Boone–era Yankees lose another heartbreaking playoff series, or inhabiting my current mode of powerhouse hip-hop critic and amusing lifestyle writer, I’ve had a fraught relationship with money—particularly with not having enough of it, and not knowing how and where to spend it when I do. My family has always risen and fallen in class status: intermittent trips to Miami, a yawning apartment at the end of Riverside Drive that was replaced by a small spot in Riverdale. The fact is that, most of the time, my money comes from white institutions and is spent in white neighborhoods. An ex-girlfriend, whom I will always love dearly, used to tease me by calling me a 1970s Black man: “Your ideal mode of conversation is cocaine, Scorsese, Spike, Black–Jewish relations, the Knicks, Ghostface, and a white woman,” she once said. Not wrong.
Reading “Alice” will provoke strong reactions from any reader, but don’t decide what you think until it’s all over. After a gentle start, this book goes gangbusters, then has a completely unexpected and ingenious ending. It’s almost as if Blakley-Cartwright invites us to participate in a thought experiment — how the hell is this going to turn out? She gets the prize for the winning solution.
“We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueller.