Slate critics Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and Katy Waldman discuss Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
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New Books in Native American Studies - Nancy Shoemaker, “Native American Whalemen and the World” (UNC Press, 2015)
For as long as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed.
The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod, just one letter of difference from Pequot, a Native nation living within what is now southern New England. Perhaps Mellville was just participating in the widespread romantic nostalgia of the age, when many corporate enterprises and vessels took the name of the supposedly disappearing and noble Indians.
Or, maybe he was simply gesturing at the reality of the industry.
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when Moby Dick takes place, Native men from New England constituted a huge portion of the whaling workforce, some spending decades at sea, encountering diverse peoples across two oceans, and invigorating their economically marginalized reservations with vital income. These forgotten seamen finally have a chronicler in Nancy Shoemaker, professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Author or editor of seven books, her latest is Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
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Slate Books - ABC: H Is for Hawk
Slate critics Katy Waldman, Julia Turner, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Helen MacDonald's shapeshifting memoir.
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World Book Club - Marian Keyes – Rachel’s Holiday
World Book Club talks life, sex, drugs, if not rock ‘n’ roll to chart-topping Irish writer Marian Keyes about her best-selling novel Rachel’s Holiday. She answers BBC listeners' questions from around the world, and also reads several passages from her novel, about feisty 27-year-old Rachel, who is sent to a rehab clinic because of her addiction to drugs. Both funny and moving, Rachel’s Holiday examines the pain of addiction and depression, revealing a darker than usual side to Marian’s writing. The programme is presented by Harriett Gilbert.
(Photo: Marian Keyes. Credit: Barry McCall)
New Books in Native American Studies - Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2014)
Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called “Cursed by Coal.” The images and stories confirm the title. “Seems like everything’s just dying out here,” says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. “It’s because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don’t care about people living on that land.”
About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, the tallest building in the state of Arizona.
Connecting the two places is a maze of energy infrastructure, hidden and ignored when a Chase executive enters his air-conditioned top-floor office. “Electricity and power lines had become second nature in Phoenix, as assumed and expected aspect of modern life,” writes Andrew Needham. “Appearing in Phoenix’s homes, businesses, and factories at the flick of a switch, electricity seemed to exist in neither time nor space. It simply was.”
But it had to be made somewhere, as Needham vividly illustrates in his new book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2014). With booming desert cities demanding ever more power throughout the last century and into the present, the Navajo Nation’s massive coal deposits were targeted for extraction, no matter the ecological or economic cost. People are still living with the consequences.
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World Book Club - Guenter Grass – The Tin Drum
On Monday, Guenter Grass, German Nobel literature prize-winner and author of The Tin Drum, died aged 87. Before his death he had been described as "the world’s most important living writer".
We look back to 2009 when Guenter invited World Book Club into his home in Germany to put listeners' questions to him about his internationally-celebrated novel The Tin Drum.
Bitter and impassioned, the book charts the rise and fall of Nazism through the mischievous eyes of Oskar Matzerath, a dwarf who decided to stop growing at the age of three. First published half a century ago, The Tin Drum was re-published in new translations all over the world to mark its 50th birthday in 2009.
Image: Guenter Grass. Credit: Reuters
Slate Books - ABC: How to Be Both
Slate critics Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and Katy Waldman discuss Ali Smith's novel about a prickly, grief-torn teenager and her Renaissance painter counterpart.
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World Book Club - JD Salinger – The Catcher In The Rye
Harriet Gilbert discusses JD Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye with a studio audience, including questions from BBC World Service listeners as far afield as Nepal and the Czech Republic. She's in New York's Algonquin Hotel, long-time hangout of our reclusive writer, and answers your questions with the help of authors David Gilbert and Joanna Rakoff. JD Salinger wrote the book in 1951, and died in 2010.
(Photo: JD Salinger) (Credit: AP)
New Books in Native American Studies - Tracy Leavelle, “The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America” (U Penn Press, 2014)
Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The...
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World Book Club - Anne Tyler
World Book Club visits the home of the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anne Tyler, in the city of Baltimore. From her spare, elegant writing room Anne talks to Harriett Gilbert about her own personal favourite novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Abandoned by her salesman husband, fierce, sometimes cruel matriarch, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed charmer, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and intense. Now as Pearl lies dying with her children around her, the past is unlocked, each character with their own searing take on it.