THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990, wasn't that a time?

THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990
JONATHAN MAHLER
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Rating: ?5*?1*?

The Publisher Says: A sweeping chronicle of four years in 1980s New York, a crucible that would transform the city and leave it more divided than ever—a rollicking, real-life Bonfire of the Vanities featuring larger-than-life personalities of Donald Trump, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, and countless others

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events—involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters—would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. Jimmy Breslin. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire—the tabloids. In The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these convulsive, defining years.

The Gods of New York is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for Could it be both the great working-class city, lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the very systems intended to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

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My Review: That was the Manhattan I fell in love with. Not the one where St. Vincent's is a yuppie hutch. I watched the enshittification happen then; I was apparently ineffective in resisting it; now it's the entire country it's happening to, and I still feel ineffective.

Still slugging, though.

Michael Stewart, he of The Man Nobody Killed, kicks us off on our journey through the world that grew Felonious Yam into a cultural icon (mostly spite-driven because we all laughed at him then). After Ed Koch's second term ended, Giuliani became mayor, and shit went downhill fast.

If you know, you know.

The times were a-changin' and the seeds of the political hellscape of today were there and scaring some of us. I still feel bad we didn't stop it. Reading this year-by-year, carefully non-partisan reminder of my generation's abject failures on stages large and small did not fill me with ebullient glee. Fauci's horrific inaction during the AIDS crisis, lack of empathy and flexibility, reminded me of how loud the haters got when he was doing a much better job during COVID. If they'd been around for the ACT UP years....

This isn't history to me, the way it will be to all y'all who didn't live it; it's my past retold. I'm glad I read it. I got closure-sobs for things I'd forgotten I'd forgotten. It's not fun to live in interesting times...but who ever does not? The way the world works is upheaval and change and rage and hate simmer, then boil, then simmer...eternal cycles of it.

I'm so sorry we did not do better when there was a chance to stop the scum from rising above their capacity to understand basic morality. Mea culpa.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS, Moroccan author's Anglophone debut from 2016

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS
FOUAD LAROUI (tr. Emma Ramadan; intro. Laila Lalami)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning English-language debut by Morocco's most prominent contemporary author, a linked story collection exploring what it means to be foreign.

Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"

One of Literary Hub's Books to Read this May

One of Asbury Park Press Books to Read this Summer
This long-awaited English-language debut from Morocco's most prominent contemporary writer won the Prix Gouncourt de Nouvelles, France's most prestigious literary award, for best story collection. Laroui uses surrealism, laugh-out-loud humor, and profound compassion across a variety of literary styles to highlight the absurdity of the human condition, exploring the realities of life in a world where everything is foreign.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Funny, farcical, sometimes surreal...or do I just lack context to get the concrete reality of what he's saying...we have Laila Lalami to thank for this collection's appearance in English nine years ago. She set out to interest US publishers in a different book entirely, On Islamism: A Personal Refutation of Religious Fundamentalism, which is still untranslated into English (though available in Dutch and, of course, French) and which I myownself would devour whole, but this collection won the nod of premiering Laroui's quirky worldview to us. Deep Vellum does this work from multiple languages into US English and, every #WITMonth, takes a strong lead on books reviewed here.

The tone of this collection is deadpan. Much of the humor, culturally bound, in it requires a moment's thought to "get" but is never crudely or condescendingly signposted by either the author or translator Emma Ramadan. I find this refreshing; I am happy to make an effort to understand what I'm reading, and I'm aware people who read my reviews are, too. There is a lot of surface fun, and a lot of surreal oddness, to enjoy in the stories. It's a collection that tells us, no matter where we are in space and time, others in other spaces and times were and are just as perplexed, bemused, and wryly amused as we are.

Comme d'habitude, these nine stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers has fun with the fish-out-of-water trope, telling it in slightly Kafkaesque twists as a self-important fool has truly weird things...your trousers ever just disappear on you?...then even stranger responses to his predicament that are wildly disproportionate. Skewers every archetype of The Establishment. As the fool narrates his story to "us" (the invisible audience stand-in) he grows more and more agitated, and I grew louder and louder in my cackles and snorts. 4.5*

Dislocation does what it says on the tin...dislocates you. The question, repeated with variations. "What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything is foreign?" and we are off into an entire field of rabbit holes leading into misuderstandings, double entendres, miscommunications. What does Maati's "sweet, kind Anna" mean when she says he's "Moroccan by birth, in body, but "French in the head"? What levels of displacement, belonging without being accepted, are there in "sweet, kind Anna" (who isn't) "laughed in his face {when} even he wasn't very convinced by his pro domo plea." (An argument made in support of one's existing case.) Deeper and deeper, Anna the touchstone, the source of all the emotion (mostly anger) as the narrator, I kept thinking of him as the interlocutor, the straight man, feeding me thoughts I found funny-hmmm and funny-haha in differing proportions the deeper we got into Utrecht where he seeks asylum and has married "sweet, kind Anna" as "{t}his one went forth in quest of truth as a hero, and at last got for himself a small, decked-up lie: his marriage he calleth it."

He decides, stunned, what these twists and turns and gyrations mean. You get the same privilege. I was swept into the slipstream and liked where I went. 4*

Born Nowhere is hung on the story-nail in the wall of Melpomene's study holding up the tragedy's summation: "After all, I know who I am, right?"

That remains to be seen, Moroccan in Paris, trying to evade repression oppression and impression: "This story proves what I have always believed. Identity problems don't exist. We create them! 'Who am I? Where am I going? What am I good for?'" He's in for an ugly surprise, like so many in this ever-more-tightly surveilled world of 2025. 3.5* for its sketchiness, incompleteness of narrative

Kuourigba, or the Laws of the Universe allows us to eavesdrop on the coffee-house chat of several young men, one a stringer for La Tribune de Casablanca with a tale of Kuourigba to tell. A general strike, a blow against global capitalism, and the forces of reaction writ small, local, petty in the French sense. Much palaver there in the Café de le Univers, in the shaggy-dog story way of young men solving problems they're a ways off from understanding. 3*

What's Not Said in Brussels is just not sayable. How does a couple survive long-distance (a question I'm intimately enmeshed in now) and survive language mismatches and cultural cross-purposes too? Annie (who doesn't get his jokes) and John (who "mansplains" everything) arrange to meet in Brussels with the intent of breaking up, though neither has said that to the other yet. A cloud of seemingly random bits and patches of thought and memory obtrude, intrude, exude a mist of influence over each of them.

Never decide things in the silence of your head when they need to be enacted in the clamor of life as we humans live it. It's pointless and it causes a lot of wasted anxiety. 4*

Bennani's Bodyguard poor Nagib, those autoimmune diseases might've been preferable.

Another Café romp through what language does when friends, close enemies that they are, become, and embody for each other, are in full cry as they pursue storycraft to the detriment, or the exaltation in reverse, of mere logic. 4.5*

The Invention of Dry Swimming is so surreal, so funny within that range of unreality, and so impossible to convey in summary that I'm offering only this: "If this story does not make you laugh in startled awareness of these thoughts being expressed, seek medical assistance for your probable ischemic event." 4.5*

Fifteen Minutes as Philosophers feels the most like it was written by a French intellectual (it was) and aimed at other French intellectuals (I ain't). I can't decide if this is intended to cause embarrassment or amusement. It left me unmoved. The only one in the entire collection I did not fully enjoy, it was still very intriguing because I was uncertain of the effect on me that was intended. 3*

The Night Before Revolution! War! Action at last! Overthrowing the Oppressor!

...and then what...? 4*

THE WITCH'S ORCHARD, very promising authorial and series debut...with reservations

THE WITCH'S ORCHARD
ARCHER SULLIVAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A ninth generation Appalachian herself, Archer Sullivan brings the mountains of North Carolina to life in The Witch’s Orchard, a wonderfully atmospheric novel that introduces private investigator Annie Gore.

Former Air Force Special Investigator Annie Gore joined the military right after high school to escape the fraught homelife of her childhood. Now, she’s getting by as a private investigator and her latest case takes her to an Appalachian holler not unlike the one where she grew up.

Ten years ago, three little girls went missing from their tiny mountain town. While one was returned, the others were never seen again. After all this time without answers, the brother of one of the girls wants to hire an outsider, and he wants Annie. While she may not be from his town, she gets mountain towns. Mountain people. Driving back into the hills for a case this old—it might be a fool’s errand. But Annie needs to put money in the bank and she can’t turn down a case. Not even one that dredges up her own painful past.

In the shadow of the Blue Ridge, Annie begins to track the truth, navigating a decade’s worth of secrets, folklore of witches and crows, and a whole town that prefers to forget. But while the case may have been buried, echoes of the past linger. And Annie’s arrival stirs someone into action.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I about blew a gasket when applehead dolls and a Datsun 260Z appeared in the first fifteen pages. I was sure as sure can be that here was a five-star read.

But then. Let me explain.

I love stories about Appalachia that do't dump on the people like certain political scumbags did. I love strong and capable women investigators who don't have any truck with men telling 'em no, and bonus points to one with male friends not lovers. I love women who write books with accurate car names, and include their woman protagonists in this. All present and accounted for.

Then we play the mother card. We see crimes against little girls. Not, I stress, sexual ones, or this would've been Pearl-Ruled. The wrap-up was, as I feared, mother-related. I am not a Cult of Mother believer, my own mother was awful. Reading the resolution to this story was horrifying on multiple levels. I'm glad the Cult of Mother does not come out of the story unscathed, but it's extremely unpleasant to read another crimes-against-girl story no matter the resolution. I'd be frothingly furious if the girls in question had been treated as so many in crime fiction are.

Mystery and thriller writers need not to use girls-in-jeopardy as a plot engagement device. It is a cultural message that is toxic both to girls (who are, in adolescence, beginning to consume adult-oriented mystery series where their culturally pervasive role is victimhood) and to men, offering implicit targets in the existence of women as prey in entertainment every-damn-where.

So I love the book's execution, its solid plot-bones kept me reading, and the first-time author has an excellent touch with her side characters. I want this to be a series...I'll read Brimstone Hollow in 2026, if y'all want me to...I'm not able to overlook, however, the serious-to-me issue of using crimes against girls for entertainment value.

That is insupportable.

THE FIRST WIFE: A Tale of Polygamy, Mozambican novel of polygamy's costs by Mozambique's first published woman novelist

THE FIRST WIFE: A Tale of Polygamy
PAULINA CHIZIANE (tr. David Brookshaw)
Archipelago Books
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double—or rather, a quintuple—life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband's duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women—as well as an additional lover—according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights.

In this brilliantly funny and feverishly scathing critique, a major work from Mozambique's first published female novelist, Paulina Chiziane explores her country's traditional culture, its values and hypocrisy, and the subjection of women the world over.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Archipelago Books brought this translation of a novel by the first Mozambican woman novelist published in 2016, fourteen years after it appeared in Portuguese.

The first ever woman novelist in Mozambique had published her first fiction in 1990.

Margaret Cavendish had been dead for three hundred thirty-one years, Murasaki Shikibu for almost a thousand, when this book was brought out in Mozambique. That's just to offer but two of the woman novelists whose work a properly-run society cannot be had without. I think this makes Author Chiziane's point for her all by itself: The culture of Mozambique is deeply misogynistic.

So are all the others I know anything about.

I relished Rami's adamantine determination to redress one small-in-the-scheme-of-things balance. She demanded, and got, a just solution to a bad situation. And it worked fine.

It was also funny as hell to see her lying louse of a husband was, thanks to the rage-fueled cleverness and the strategic solidarity, of the four other women he wronged. In a culture that allows polygamy, he lied about his actions; he suffered consequences but what can make up for lying to and betraying the trust of the woman...the women...who bore your children and cared for you?

Not sure I can think of an answer at all let alone a condign one.

Like all the best tendentious stories, this one needs to be handled with either humor, Author Chiziane's choice, or murderous rage. It was obvious to me that the events of the novel are heartfelt cris-de-cœur from one herself deeply hurt by the extreme inequality of the sexes in her culture. After independence and civil wars, the ruling party had made some progress to curb legal abuses of women. As that progress eroded, Author Chiziane..."storyteller" as she refers to herself not novelist ("I am a storyteller... I take my inspiration from tales around the campfire, my first art school")...wrote this scathing, funny work of revenge fiction. In about two hundred fifty pages she takes on the system that repressed, gave hope to, then let down...again...the people it rebelled to protect.

I'm not sure how to explain the parallels I see in this woman's story and the stories of those (like me) threatened by the impending and the still nebulous rollbacks of progress in the Anglophone world. I'm not sure I should need to. I'm not sure how to convince you more powerfully that an ebook purchase of less than ten dollars will both entertain, and energize you to resist what's happening around us.

I hope I have.

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, biography of a recovered queer elder

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen
BONNIE YOCHELSON (foreword by Victoria Munro & Jessica B Phillips)
Empire State Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$39.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more

Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This isn't an obvious fit for the usual definition of #WITMonth I've been working with. Indulge me for a moment: In society, now as much as in Austen's time, there is a phenomenon called "code switching." It's a kind of translation your queer friends know well, and your young friends, your opposite-gender friend;, we are most all of us doing a bit of code-switching.

What Author Yochelson does in this magisterial biography of lesbian artist and bon vivant is a translation of Austen's code-switching between woman of substance and closeted (as all were then required to be)...if only barely...lesbian in a long-term partnership.

It occurred to me to call this a translation when I read more about how Austen "{rejected} the taint of commerce...{and} remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side." This was a woman who spoke one language, of intimacy and sapphic love, at home, and a very, very different one among her public social circle. Austen documented, and Author Yochelson caringly and carefully examines, the world of women we would otherwise never know existed.

What this book does with skill and panache is the very thing the presently installed in government social reactionaries hate the most: Demonstrate in words and pictures that queerness, its existence and its joyfulness, has always existed and thus is among the real identities others can ascribe to.

There is more shock in the world of today at these intimate, fun-having images than there was in the earlier Gilded Age, because the sexual lives of others are more publicly known and thus easier to discuss...and judge...than the private lives of the day. Gossip was then shameful, vulgar, low; and is now journalism, casually reported and widely and openly discussed. Reality TV and celebrity journalism are thoroughly established in respectability.

It is a world I suspect Miss Austen would thoroughly dislike.

This house, this family, is Miss Austen's native world. Gossip about personal lives, while surely (humanly) indulged in, would not be done in public by these folk. Officially. Behind hands and doors and fans, sure! Thus the need to code-switch constantly would've kept Miss Austen and later Miss Tate (her partner) as well quite busy and alert.

The ladies in question in later life

The value of this explication of life among the hidden sapphic sisters of the era can't be overstated. Aesthetically we're all much richer for the re-emergence of these images; societally, we are hugely enriched by this evidence of the way diversity has flourished and enriched the culture of every era.

Look carefully, these were shocking, as tame as they seem now!

I think this work of translation from lives once unable to be spoken openly to the mass medium of publishing, as a rescue operation of identity and artistry previously masked and ignored, is worth the purchase price. There are over 100 photographs in the text. It is a treasure trove of lesbian life in the first Gilded Age. It is also a human life's worth of creative joy and pleasure shared.

It is, most importantly in my eyes, my elder sibling in queerness restored to me, guiding me through the world's rage and hate by her example. Celebrate that beauty and gift.

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization, enjoyable, informative microhistory of an invisibly ubiquitous invention

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
TIM QUEENEY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes readers on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. Considering Magellan’s world-circling ships, the 15th century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, or a Polynesian multihull with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and their discoveries would have been possible. Time traveling, he describes the building of the pyramids, the Roman Coliseum, Hagia Sofia, Notre Dame, the Sultan Hasan Mosque, the Brooklyn Bridge and countless other constructions that would not have been possible without rope.

Not content to just look at rope’s past, Queeney looks at its future and how the re-invention of rope using steel strands to make wire rope and later synthetic fibers will likely provide the strength for cables to support elevators into space. Making the story or rope real for readers, Queeney tells remarkable nautical stories of his own reliance on rope to survive—“While approaching Buzzard’s Bay in the dark of night, we were hit by a fierce squall…The wrong line was eased, and the 200-pound hunk of wood that holds the top of the sail, went flying out of control, swaying wildly and threatening to knock us into the inky ocean. Finally, the proper ropes were located in the dark, firm hands hauled them taught and the gaff was brought under control. It was a sobering display of rope’s often unacknowledged role and uncredited importance.” Rope is history, adventure and the story of one of the world’s most common tools that has made it possible for humans to advance throughout the century.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tim Queeney is treading on Mark Kurlansky's and Mary Roach's territories with this historical and sociological survey of rope, its development, its role in society, and its future uses.

While many short lengths of rope helped countless individuals through the centuries, rope also was a tool of human innovation writ large through collective action. Just as many small strands come together to form a rope, so, too, did many people gather to perform the biggest of tasks. The exemplar of this from the ancient world is the Egyptian pyramids. While we don’t know exactly how these human-built mountains were assembled, we can be sure that rope was an essential tool in their construction. In this way rope stands as both a tool and a symbol of humans working together to achieve the greatest things.

He sets his sights high. The book is even organized into "strands" not chapters, which seemed cutesy to me at first...it's not, it is in fact subtle and informative. I'm happy to report he succeeds in the rope-climb to success.

Its cultural significance is revealed by a parade of expressions: “roped me in,”“rope it off,”“tied in knots,”“rope-a-dope,”“roped and branded,”“give him/ her enough rope,”“at the end of my rope,”“throw me a rope,”“give me some slack,”“on the ropes ,”“go piss up a rope,”“learn the ropes,”“a rope of sand.” This incomplete list of everyday sayings just shows how deeply into our consciousness rope has entwined itself.

Readable, relatable, illuminating, and fun to learn about, who knew rope was so culturally significant? I've reached the end of my rope more than once, and still had not thought about the rope I was running out of. I've had enough fun in my life finding the men who live by the old gay truism, "if you can rope me, you can ride me," that I ought to be far more alert to how ropey my grasp of the subject is.

I have a greatly expanded respect for how many metaphors and concepts tie back to rope and its variants, starting with "religion"...re- (back to, again)+ligare (to tie, to rope onto)= "religion." A concept hiding in plain sight, one that could not exist without that extremely early invention of humankind, the rope.

The development of rope was surprisingly technological; in fact if we had not been scientists by our very nature rope could not exist. Many aspects of its creation were impossible without trial and error based on what we today would describe as "materials science"...does grass get stronger or weaker when bundled together? is green grass more or less useful than dried grass? exactly how dried is optimal for making cordage?...a tiny, tiny peek into the huge variety of questions Author Queeney introduces us to as he explicates the scientific process as we developed it.

No tool is not also a weapon: "string him up" and its variants did not come about as a common phrase because someone was decorating a loved one in a string vest. Author Queeney does not shy away from elucidating the horrifying, evil uses humanity put its early invention the rope to. The details are stomach-churning, but the facts are incontrovertible. We love to be hatefully cruel. I'm sure some readers will skip right over these parts in order not to lose sleep. I strongly caution those highly averse to animal cruelty to pay close attention to prefatory language used as they read along.

I'm carrying on about a five-star read but there's not a whole fifth star. The half-star lost got hung up on that pesky thing, the content warning. The fact is there's not much human awfulness I haven't read about or seen in the past *mumble*ty-five years. I still felt blindsided by the overly-careful enumeration of the nasty uses we use rope for. Lingering on these unpleasantnesses slowed my roll through the story of rope. Don't get tied up in these things if you're at all squeamish; fresh strands await.

A thoroughly noted and sourced elucidation of the importance of an invisbly ubiquitous invention. Its many pleasures for the broadly curious reader require some common-sense personalization of the reading experience. Those who need chew-toys for their brains are going to batten on the trivia embedded in the long strand roping human history together.

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT, humor is hard, but better when hard-edged

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT
AGUR SCHIFF (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen.

An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm willing to bet that most people squirm just reading the synopsis. It's a reckoning with the long shadow of chattel slavery and its ties to Jewish merchants.

I think the best choice Author Schiff made was to tell the story in a comedic register, relying on farcical coincidences of crime and punishment to acknowledge past harms while lampooning present ones caused by some clumsy, bureaucratic attempt at balancing cosmic scales.

The far more interesting point Author Schiff makes, to me at least, is the sheer ubiquity of the mental construct of Africa as lesser, as broken and needing "us" to fix it. The way Professor Schiff approaches his putative project in the narrative begs the question "why are you doing this?"

As a meditation on white guilt versus White Guilt, I think it's a great contribution to necessary conversations about Jewish complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery. As a novel about an individual man's coming to self-awareness, it felt...off.

The parallels drawn between Ancestor Schiff and his appropriation of the slavegirl, and Storyteller Schiff and his relationship to his cleaner, weren't that successful in my reading eyes. They felt as performative as the arrest and legal proceedings of Storyteller Schiff did, without the sharp edge of satire to make them cut my tough hide of willful ignorance. As a result, I was more squicked out than I was challenged to contemplate the real meaning of these sexual crimes. In fact I felt less sympathy for Ancestor Schiff before Storyteller Schiff's peccadillo was brought in. I think the opposite was intended.

I know that could really be a "me" thing, but I bring it up to alert readers who find sexual exploitation deeply unpleasant that this could decrease their reading pleasure.

I'm not as delighted by the read as others were but I am happy to have read a reckoning with an underrepresented crime of historical complicity.