Child piano prodigy Ruth Slenczynska received an urgent telegram in 1934: Famed pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff couldn’t play at his performance in Los Angeles because of an elbow injury. Could she fill in?
Slenczynska was 9.
If you’re a vacation prepper like me — think a pin-clustered Google Maps and dossier-level Google docs — joining a line is a way to stay present and not overthink every decision. Now you’re a temporary part of the local community. All those sets of feet are a collective vote of confidence. What you’re about to eat is worth it.
Andrew Leland addresses this prevalent fear of blindness among sighted people in his heart-wrenching new memoir The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (2023), which details the writer’s progressive loss of vision from retinitis pigmentosa. According to Leland, “[t]here are a few common souvenirs that sighted tourists tend to take away from day trips to the country of the blind. The primary one is pity masquerading as empathy: ‘How difficult their lives are,’ one might conclude, while more quietly affirming, Thank god for my eyesight.” Leland occupies an unusual position: not only is he losing his sight as an adult, but he’s also losing it gradually. He perceives the world with a “paradoxical double vision: through sighted eyes, and through blind ones,” and is thus particularly attuned to the challenges, slights, and condescension to which blind people are frequently subject.
From her base in the Forest of Dean, Lyons taps into networks of local enthusiasts, wildlife photographers, rangers and boar-haters who help her find traces of the elusive animals. Groundbreakers is rich in evocative accounts of her own solitary, wonder-charged encounters, from resonant snorts and grunts in the darkness to glimpses of sows leading litters of the boarlets known as “humbugs” for their striped coats. Their advocates describe boars’ many contributions to our ecosystems: ploughing up the earth for tasty acorns, tubers, bulbs and grubs, they benefit wild flowers, trees, birds and other animals. They encourage the return of a shrub layer in woodland, and break up the choking swathes of a single plant species – in Britain usually bracken – that spring up on depleted and mismanaged land.
Waidner’s humor is similarly accessible — playful and unpretentious; and their prose, despite being peppered with foreign phrases and grammatical oddities, is disarmingly smooth. But working hard just beneath the surface of this feisty, funny, easily digestible insanity are bigger ideas, about who deserves to be rescued from tough circumstances, and why. What happens if the person in need of assistance doesn’t match the image of a model recipient?