{"id":232413,"date":"2024-01-25T10:58:18","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T15:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=232413"},"modified":"2024-01-25T10:58:18","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T15:58:18","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-1-25-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-1-25-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar\u2019s Martyr!<\/em>, Menachem Kaiser on J\u00f3zsef Debreczeni\u2019s Cold Crematorium<\/em>, Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz\u2019s The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em>, and Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Gl\u00fcck\u2019s About Ed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Brought to you by Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Kaveh<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cShame-ridden Shams is the sun around which Martyr!<\/em>\u00a0moves. The writing evokes shades of Denis Johnson\u2014in the gutted, elegiac quality of Train Dreams<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>but also flashes of the hapless antihero of \u2018Emergency.\u2019 It is sumptuous with metaphors, at their best when animating Cyrus\u2019s childhood \u2026 With <\/i>a kaleidoscope of perspectives that illuminate almost 40 years of history, the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War and dreamlike scenes outside of time, the novel is obsessed with how \u2018meaningless\u2019 individual suffering can become legible \u2018at the level of empire,\u2019 asking what turns a death into a martyrdom. With its scope, intense interest in the limits of language and self-aware narrative strategy, Martyr!<\/em> has both focus and heft. Yet it is also unpretentiously veined with the language of sacred and poetic texts, and is studded with new poetry from Akbar writing as Cyrus \u2026<\/p>\n

In the hands of a lesser writer with an agenda, this material could be esoteric and tedious, but Akbar\u2019s narrative maintains a glorious sense of whimsy: In one chapter, the ghost of Cyrus\u2019s mother speaks with Lisa Simpson; later, a Trumpian buffoon attempts to complete a gory transaction for the Mona Lisa in a mall \u2026 Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind\u2019s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity\u2014through metaphor and with humor that lands. He invites the reader to embrace the kind of queer sense-making that finds no answers yet rests, as Cyrus says, with, \u2018All I know is I\u2019m fascinated.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar\u2019s Martyr!<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Cold<\/p>\n

\u201cThe details are so precise that any critical distance collapses\u2014nothing\u2019s expected, nothing\u2019s dulled by clich\u00e9. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I\u2019ve ever encountered. It\u2019s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. \u2018Horror is always kitsch,\u2019 he writes after an ad hoc execution, \u2018even when it\u2019s real\u2019 \u2026<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final third\u2014in which Debreczeni has been assigned to the \u201ccold crematorium,\u201d a place where inmates too sick to work are left to die\u2014is especially staggering\u2026Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit \u2026 The finest examples of Holocaust literature\u2014and Cold Crematorium<\/em> is so fine it transcends its category\u2014aren\u2019t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Menachem Kaiser on J\u00f3zsef Debreczeni\u2019s Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Adam<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA biography of the psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is, inevitably, a biography of the world he fought to change. Fanon would no doubt have approved: As a pioneer of \u2018social therapy,\u2019 an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms, he understood better than anyone that individuals are unintelligible in isolation. The maladies he treated as the director of a mental hospital in colonial Algeria, where he worked on the eve of the country\u2019s fight for independence in the 1950s, were to him inextricable from the deadliest illness of all: the epidemic of French imperialism.<\/p>\n

A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as \u2018cleansing force.\u2019 But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel\u2019s Clinic<\/em>, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers \u2026 As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz\u2019s The Rebel\u2019s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Madness\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty.\u00a0At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, \u2018drapetomania.\u2019 Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern \u2018expert\u2019 in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as \u2018whipping the devil out of them.\u2019 In the decades following the prohibition of slavery, the United States found another way to use psychology to control Black Americans\u2014and squeeze out more free labor. As detailed in the journalist Antonia Hylton\u2019s fascinating Madness<\/em>, the \u2018feeble-minded\u2019 Blacks were rounded up and placed in asylums where they were put to work as indentured servants \u2026<\/p>\n

Madness<\/em>, though ostensibly the story of Crownsville, is really about the continued lack of understanding, treatment and care of the mental health of a people, Black people, who need it most.\u00a0Near the end of her book, Hylton invokes the 2023 story of Jordan Neely. In visible distress and screaming that he was hungry, he was thrown to the floor of the New York subway by a former Marine who locked him in a chokehold and killed him. \u2018I thought of Maynard when The New York Post<\/em> labeled Jordan Neely \u201cunhinged\u201d and a \u201cvagrant\u201d and wrote about him as though he had been the villain in the story of his own public killing,\u2019 Hylton notes. Though both Foster and Neely were in need of treatment, care, support and kindness, she adds, they \u2018were met with almost anything but.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Linda Villarosa on Antonia Hylton\u2019s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum<\/em> <\/strong><\/a>(The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"About<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cGl\u00fcck is a self-professed slow writer, but he was also delayed by the burden of his book\u2019s content\u2014the subject was his first real boyfriend, and he had to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality\u2026Time enabled him to create something uncommon and powerful. About Ed<\/em> is a literary monument that harnesses memoir\u2019s emotional honesty while indulging fiction\u2019s stylistic latitude \u2026 The book\u2019s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to AIDS. In Gl\u00fcck\u2019s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling\u2014Gl\u00fcck is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed<\/em>, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise \u2026<\/p>\n

The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Gl\u00fcck operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed<\/em> revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp \u2026 The parts of Ed that are barred to Bob are the core of the book\u2019s sadness and mystery. Gl\u00fcck often slips into poetic spacing when integrating Ed\u2019s prose, reminding us of the contrivance of appropriation. We\u2019re always aware of the author\u2019s hand, assembling and editing Ed\u2019s words, and thus of the hard limits of our ability to inhabit and connect with Ed directly. The book makes us question whether human beings in general resist the complete soul-merging that Bob seeks through romantic sex and appropriative writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Gl\u00fcck\u2019s About Ed<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar\u2019s Martyr!, Menachem Kaiser on J\u00f3zsef Debreczeni\u2019s Cold Crematorium, Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz\u2019s The Rebel\u2019s Clinic, and Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Gl\u00fcck\u2019s About Ed. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews. * \u201cShame-ridden Shams is the sun […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":232414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[36298,15654,13821],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/The-Rebels-Clinic.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-YsB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}