Category Archives: Atlantic
The Writer and the Politician
December 11, 2013 They had first met in Cairo, in 1961, when she was working for “The Arab Observer,” an English-language weekly, and married to Vusumzi Make. Make and Mandela were political enemies, as were their organizations — the Pan Africanist … Continue reading
A Scot and the New Yorker
December 4, 2014 A bad cold, and the last week of class — so this is how I’d be remembered by everyone: hoarse, stuffed up, inarticulate, incapable of complex thought. On a whim, I decided to see if there’s a … Continue reading
Equiano’s Turkey
November 28, 2013 Yes, according to Mark Forsyth, the Thanksgiving bird is named after a country 4429 miles away. But not the first to be so named. In fact, the original turkey was a guinea fowl from Madagascar, brought to … Continue reading
Animals in Chicago
November 6, 2013 It seems right that the theme this year for the Chicago Humanities Festival should be “Animals: What Makes us Human.” This city, after all, used to be called (and maybe is still called) hog butcher for … Continue reading
Beyond a Boundary: C. L. R. James in Glasgow
May 13, 2013 Scotland and the Caribbean? The architecture of Glasgow tells a dramatic story. Here, in the center of town, is the many-pillared Gallery of Modern Art, monumental even for a museum, which used to be the … Continue reading
Louise Erdrich, Kurt Vonnegut: Germany’s Wars
November 21, 2012 There is a longer title to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too … Continue reading
Edward Weston, Walt Whitman: Grass
November 7, 2012 Whitman, poet of New Jersey and New York. Also poet of grass, the force of demographics, what comes up from the ground. He would have been unsurprised by Hurricane Sandy, or by the rising sea levels … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac, Edwidge Danticat: Joual and Creole
October 10, 2012 The name on his birth certificate is Jean Louis Kirouac – that’s the most common spelling of the name in Quebec, which is where his parents were from. His father, Léon-Alcide, continued to work as a printer … Continue reading
Children’s Books, Children’s Songs: Gertrude Stein, Paul Robeson
September 5, 2012 Last year Yale University Press brought out Gertrude Stein’s To Do: A Book for Alphabets and Birthdays, never published in her lifetime. Stein had written it as a follow-up to her first children’s book, The World is … Continue reading
Atlantic Sound: Caryl Phillips, Thomas Pynchon, Richard and Mimi Fariña
August 22, 2012 At the end of The Atlantic Sound, Caryl Phillips is in Israel, visiting a community of Black Hebrews, almost 2000 of them, African-Americans who emigrated from the United States. They have given up their U.S. citizenship, but … Continue reading