What is the impulse behind art? “I have to be moved in some way,” the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. “They just don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.” And that, he said, was why he played.
Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move anyone else as that work moved me—as “Gimme Shelter,” Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.
For a second, in the dark, we revert to the tender beings we were born as, forgetting to wear the suits tailored for us by society’s merciless designer. We realize we have a role to play, however small it seems: not in a world of puppet masters, but among the forces of the natural world.
Martin’s subtitle, “A Personal and Pyronatural History,” alludes to her impressive interweaving of various narrative modes. The result is a deft tessellation of medical memoir, local reportage, and ecocritical and literary meditation. Martin situates the worsening wildfires amid deficiencies in California’s housing stock and the politics of disaster response; with grim, unrelenting curiosity, she considers the catastrophes’ implications for migrant workers, land-based industries, and community-supported agriculture networks. She is at her most compelling, though, when looking inward to examine lived experience and the often problematic or insufficient narrative frameworks in which those experiences are couched.
The book is at its most fascinating when explaining what our bodies are doing and why. The point of having periods (something many people who menstruate have wondered about) is to help humans give birth to healthy babies. But they are a drain on a body’s resources, and they can go wrong. Gunter is evangelical about sharing knowledge, insisting that painful periods are not just an inevitable part of life; that debilitating conditions can often be treated; and that no woman need suffer in silence or shame. At times it veers towards diagnostic handbook territory, but those bits can be skimmed or skipped. Think of Blood as like a Haynes manual for your uterus.
“One may as well begin with Socrates.” So opens Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960.” Observe how that sentence conveys a certain offhand jauntiness, yet subtly reveals a distinctly learned author: Krishnan, who teaches philosophy at Cambridge, implies he could have chosen any number of other philosophers instead of Socrates. At the same time, his decision to create this particular sentence indicates a writer confident enough, and well read enough, to echo one the most famous first lines in 20th-century British fiction: “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” the opening of E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.”