Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i The American Scholar

We recently learned that Edward Hoagland's “On Aging” (Spring 2022) will be included in this year's Best American Essays anthology, edited by Vivian Gornick. It's a lovely honor for Hoagland, a Scholar contributing editor whose career has spanned nearly seven decades, as well as for Robert Wilson, our long-time editor, for it was in Bob's final issue before his retirement that “On Aging” appeared. I had the opportunity to edit an essay of Hoagland's more than a decade ago, but because he had, by that time, lost nearly all of his eyesight, our usual process had to be adapted significantly. The only way for us to go over the edit was for me to read the manuscript to him on the phone; he would tell me what changes he wanted…

One afternoon 40 years ago, soon after beginning graduate work in history at the University of Virginia, I was sitting at a study carrel with a pile of books and a stack of index cards. The latter, I had learned, was one of the historian's most important tools—so important, in fact, that a renowned professor whose specialty was the Austro-Hungarian army devoted an entire class to telling us how to fill one in correctly. Now this strikes me as comical, but back then it struck me as comforting: having studied philosophy as an undergrad, I yearned for the kind of clarity custom-made for a three-by-five card. Whereas philosophical questions led only to more questions, historical questions led to the archives, where answers waited to be unearthed. Deep down, I believed…

Even after all these years, I am still amazed at the seemingly magical process by which a skilled editor can transform a manuscript— how, after a draft or two (or sometimes more), your prose somehow becomes seamless and your narrative propulsive, the best version of your ideas somehow emerging from the page. The finest editors have an ear like a concert musician, anticipating what you intended to say even before you yourself have said it, and the structural sensibilities of an engineer, capable of creating the architecture required of a piece. At its best, the editor-writer relationship can be transformative, euphoric even. At its worst, in the hands of an ax-wielding butcher, it can feel like losing a limb, no sedation. Compelling stuff, yes, but not exactly suitable for the…

Ann Beattie, a contributing editor of the Scholar, has published 20 novels and short story collections. She is the recipient of the PEN/ Malamud Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Her work appears in five O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies as well as in Best American Short Stories of the Century. L ucretia was eight when she took the walk with her mother in Staunton, Virginia, where they'd moved after her mother's job in Norfolk ended. Now they lived with her mother's favorite cousin, Riley Prall, who was 52, and in a weakened condition, though he'd painted a room of his apartment lavender for Lucretia, because it was her favorite color. Her mother, Edith, had been amazed that he'd been so thoughtful—though why that should have surprised…

David Chrisinger's The Soldier's Truth is a road book suffused with a spirit of discovery and adventure. Perhaps no genre is better suited to its subject, the World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who could not stay home. Chrisinger asked himself what he might learn if he “roused the hibernating nomad buried deep inside me, and retraced Ernie's steps through the war.” In the acknowledgments, he reveals his model: Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. Horwitz's wonderful book is, as many readers will recall, an odyssey through the landscape of Civil War memory. It took root in its author's childhood encounters with a book of war sketches owned by his greatgrandfather and with The Photographic History of the Civil War, a multivolume pictorial extravaganza from which his father read to…

As unlikely as it sounds, we've entered the age of the physics beach read—a breezy stroll through some branch of the science, with alternating touches of profundity and whimsy. Recent exemplars include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The latest aspirant is In a Flight of Starlings, a slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics. In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems By Giorgio Parisi Penguin Press, 144 pp., $24 The title refers to Parisi's research on the eerily amorphous flocks that starlings form each night at…

The way my mother told the story, my birth was a miracle. Diagnosed with terminal cancer six months into the pregnancy, she was not expected to live to the end of the nine-month term. Doctors told her that if she were to have an abortion, she might live an additional 18 months. She declined, and the doctors sent her home to die, unable to do anything further. My mother called for her pastor to come and lay hands on her in a prayer of healing. The following Sunday, she entered the little white church across the street from our house, where, she said, the Holy Spirit told her to play the piano. My mother was a classical pianist before joining the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, where the music…

In 1969, I was living in London, paying $40 a month for a flat near Notting Hill Gate, wearing a secondhand pea coat against the damp, and trying to write my first novel. To earn some money, I was dashing off profiles of aging movie stars for United Artists. The studio used these pieces to promote its European films in the United States. I hated the profile business and was in the process of renouncing it when, as sometimes happens to a writer, along came an offer I couldn't refuse: to write a series of articles about Francois Truffaut's latest film, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Truffaut had been a hero of mine since I saw The 400 Blows as a freshman in college. That lyrical study of a…

One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife's bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to cast a pool of light in his dark study, he put a drop of the liquid into a tiny glass vial he had blown himself, attaching it to the back of a strange-looking device he had also constructed. Two rectangular brass plates, about three inches tall and one inch wide, had been riveted together and held a tiny glass orb between them. He lifted this object up into the light of the candle, closed one eye, and watched, for hours, until finally: a shiver of movement at…

The palmyra palm is revered by the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, where it is known as a celestial tree, a symbol of fertility, every part of which can be used. In Vidyan Ravinthiran's “The Burnt Palmyra,” one of these trees speaks. Although it has been “burnt,” the tree has survived the savage violence of the Sri Lankan civil war, unlike all “the other ruined trees” along the road where it stands, which were cut down so that their “charred and telltale” condition would not call the world's attention to manifold war crimes. Unaccountably, this tree is left to bear witness. It has been stripped of its “crown” of leaves, leaves that were traditionally used to make things both everyday and elevated, from “baskets and hats” to the manuscript scrolls…

PATRICK TRIPP is a physician and an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. In 1967 and ‘68, in the hills and valleys of Quang Tri Province, U.S. Marines established positions along the demilitarized zone that separated South Vietnam from the communist North. The Marines did not know the terrain— the jungles, ridges, and ravines of the Annamite Range, where the 60-foot tree canopy and dense undergrowth limited visibility to just a few yards. There, in the far north of South Vietnam, the cold, steady monsoon rains, called the crachin, from the French word for “drizzle,” continued for months. The land and climate were suited to the ancient military strategy of the Vietnamese, used in turning back the Mongols, the Ming,…

BILL ROORBACH is the author of 10 books, including the memoir Summers with Juliet, the novels Lucky Turtle and Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Big Bend. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Granta, among other publications. I am Fulton DeMarco, DeMarco Photography: NOTHING ESCAPES US. Or so it says on the van. Which I parked the other day in town and debarked only to be greeted by a dog on his own, tough little guy with blackened divots taken out of his brindle head in likely altercations. Not a pit bull, but stocky like that, handsome big jaw and the best grin, friend to man if not to dog. I gave him my hand to sniff but he…

Consider fungi. They are their own kingdom, more closely related to animal than to plant. They grow and search for food with threadlike hyphae. They feed by excreting digestive juices onto their dinner, living or dead, to help break down nutrients before ingesting. There are more species of fungi (as many as six million) than there are known animal species (about two million, mostly insects) or plant species (about 400,000 terrestrial species). Fungi (except yeast) reproduce by putting out spores. Chemists estimate that in any given year, 50 million tons of fungal spores are blowing about in the air. Most fungi are harmless; some are essential for our survival. We savor the fruiting bodies of portobellos and other mushrooms. Yeast gives us bread and beer. Fungi live in our gut…

Always, in wars, there are the things we don't see coming. World War I had a lot of them: airplanes, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, flamethrowers, and super-high-explosive artillery shells— the blooming, booming fruit of 19th-century scientific progress. So much had progressed except, alas, the nervous systems of the soldiers, many of whom met the challenge of the new, improved warfighting with nightmares, paralysis, trembling, mutism, hallucinations, terror, stammering, and blindness. Shell shock. What we now call posttraumatic stress disorder. This, too, no one saw coming. By December 1914, only five months into the war, Britain's frontline army had lost 10 percent of its officers and four percent of its enlisted men to “nervous and mental shock. They went mad. The title of long-time war correspondent Charles Glass's new book,…

In their new book, Henry at Work, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a surprising source of wisdom for the working world: Henry David Thoreau, infamous for shirking work by beating a retreat to the woods. Kaag and van Belle correct this cliché by reminding us that Thoreau did work—he taught, wrote, built, surveyed, and gardened. He even babysat for Ralph Waldo Emerson. More important for later generations, he reflected broadly on the worth of that work. Indeed, Thoreau was no quiet quitter but positively noisy about labor and its value. “He gave work,” as Kaag and van Belle put it, “a good Socratic grilling,” probing it from all sides, demanding that we, too, examine this thing that dictates our identities and guzzles our time. Given the combined effects…

Welcome to Freud Airlines. Your psyche is our highest priority. Do not accept any personal baggage from someone you don't know. If anyone tries to give you an unsolicited diagnosis, please alert the gate attendant. Be advised that frequent-flyer miles from Air Jung are no longer accepted at Freud Airlines. We will be boarding our fivestar analysands first, the order determined by the number of years spent in psychoanalysis. Any unaccompanied inner children should get in line now. We will next board our paranoid passengers. (We know who you are.) If you have multiple personalities, you may now all board together. A list of upgraded passengers can be found on the monitor. If your name is not listed, you will have to tolerate your envy or find a more adaptive…

On an early spring day in March, I drove 800 miles, from Brooklyn to Atlanta, to see a room I knew I could never enter. In the basement of Oglethorpe University's Phoebe Hearst Hall lies a locked room—20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet high—that's been closed for more than 80 years. The Crypt of Civilization, as it's known, was sealed on May 28, 1940, and inside are artifacts—Artie Shaw records, a plastic Donald Duck, and a bottle of Budweiser, among myriad other items—that attempt to tell the history of human civilization. Hundreds of books on microfilm—on law and history, botany and ornithology, the Boy Scouts and Freemasonry—lie in stainless steel tubes. There are voice recordings of Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and a champion hog caller, along with a…

David Stromberg is the editor of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times as well as two volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. His recent writing includes “A Short Inquiry into the End of the World,” the first in his “Mister Investigator” series of speculative essays. He lives in Jerusalem. I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I've known for years, asked me whether I'd heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005.I told him that I'd heard something of the story but that I didn't remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and…

Jennifer Sinor is an essayist and a professor of English at Utah State University. All that is not given is lost. —Indian proverb “We lost Bryan,” my father says into the phone, his voice breaking in the cavernous space between each word. He is talking to an old friend of his, someone I knew as a child, one who also lost his adult son. Sitting at a wooden table carried across the prairie in a wagon, my father cradles the phone with one hand and his head with the other. His elbows rest on wood seeped in dailiness and grief. Silence fills my parents’ kitchen as my father either weeps or receives condolence. I don't remain to find out. I do not stay to learn what can be said next.…

Great works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil's Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Christian in fourth-century CE North Africa found the first-century BCE epic poem of pagan Rome the most impressive thing in his cultural life to date. Tellingly, his reaction shows no interest in the poem's theme of individual sacrifice in the name of imperial destiny; rather, into middle age, the great theologian and founder of institutional Catholic monasticism remembered weeping for Dido, who commits suicide after her lover, Aeneas, abandons her at the end of Book IV. When we react as intensely to a work of literature as…

It's almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin's most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan's Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike. But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It's easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father…

At the age of 92, John McPhee would seem to have earned a rest. The author of more than 30 books, he has been writing for six decades for The New Yorker, where the reporting in many of those volumes first appeared. The John McPhee Reader has been a staple in nonfiction writing classes ever since it was published in 1976. Born in Princeton, where his dad was a doctor for the university's jocks, he has lived in the town for most of his life, graduating from high school and college there. In 1975, he began a second career teaching “factual writing” part time at the university. His tabula is anything but rasa. But despite the laurels that have accumulated from this activity, McPhee chooses not to rest, at least…

Soft, to your places, animals, Your legendary duty calls. —Thomas Kinsella, Another September, 1958 —Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown [fly] which had buzz'd about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,— and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,—I'll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me. —Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759–67 I…