Thursday File Books

Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority by Steve Phillips http://www.brownisthenewwhite.com Hardcover, 224 pages Published February 2nd 2016 by The New Press ISBN: 1620971151 (ISBN13: 9781620971154) -- Among America's 320,000,000 inhabitants, Latinos are the largest group of color, with a population that now exceeds 54 million. There are also 43 million African Americans and 18 million Asian Americans. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in America, slightly ahead of Latinos: from pages 21-22: "Latinos are now the largest group of color in the country, with a popula­tion that exceeds 54 million people, making up 17 percent of the total U.S. population and 46 percent of all people of color in America. "The countries of ancestry of the six largest subgroups of Latinos are Mexico (63 percent), Puerto Rico (9.2 percent), Cuba (3.5 percent), El Salvador and the Dominican Republic (each about 3 percent), and Gua­temala (2.1 percent) -- collectively comprising 84 percent of the total Latino population in the United States. Among all Latinos, 51 percent live in the Southwest on land that was part of Mexico prior to the 1846 U.S. war with Mexico (a war that started because Texas -- with the enthusiastic support of U.S. president James Polk -- sought independence from Mexico so that it could con­tinue the practice of slavery). The military conquest of Mexico cul­minated in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which compelled Mexico to relinquish its claim to the territory that now constitutes the states of California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. In the eyes of many Mexican Americans, 'illegal' isn't a word to describe people who come to America without documents, but rather a term more applicable to how America took much of Mexico at gunpoint 168 years ago. As the popular saying goes among many Mexican Ameri­cans, 'We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us!' This history of U.S. conquest and seizure of land resulted in the tearing apart of families and communities and is also why many Mexicans continue to come here to reunite with loved ones. Much of the recent growth in the U.S. Latino population is a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which provided for family reunification. In recent decades, large numbers of Latinos applied for and received visas that had formerly been denied them. "The second and third largest groups of Latinos in the United States­ -- Puerto Ricans (4.6 million people) and Cubans (1.8 million) -- are also concentrated in places tied to historical travel patterns. The island of Puerto Rico has a long and complicated history with the United States, and especially relevant to contemporary politics is the fact that Puerto Ricans are all U.S. citizens and, therefore, eligible to vote. Puerto Rican migration accelerated in the 1950s as part of the first airborne migra­tion. Many Puerto Ricans settled in New York and the surrounding states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In recent years, the economic challenges on the island have prompted a new wave of migration to the mainland, with hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans leaving the island and many of them settling in the South, in general, and Florida, in particular. "With Cuba located just ninety miles from Florida, Cuban immi­grants not surprisingly immigrated to the Sunshine State, mostly after the Cuban revolution of 1959, and today 70 percent of Cuban Ameri­cans still live in Florida. With the passage of time since the wave of immigration tied to the 1959 Cuban revolution, nearly half of all Cuban Americans in this country today were born in the United States. And with President Obama's 2015 decision to reestablish full relations with Cuba, a new era is beginning for all Cuban Americans with family and historical ties to that island nation." -- Steven H MacDowall Sign up to my blog at www.thursdayfile.com My new drawings: https://www.instagram.com/stevenhmacdowall

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A woman reading in a garden (c.1900). Harold C. Harvey (British, 1874-1941). Oil on canvas.

Galleys of Kenneth Goldsmith’s new book just arrived! Wasting Time on the Internet is about the art of mindful surfing, how our digital lives are remaking the human experience and creating a culture of collaboration. Tumblr, it’s us.

Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 By Adam Hochschild Illustrated. 438 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30 USA -- Review: ‘Spain in Our Hearts,’ by Adam Hochschild By Michael Kazin - MARCH 29, 2016 - http://www.nytimes.com For Americans on the left who know their history, no more tragic — or more romantic — event took place in the entire 20th century than the civil war in Spain. From 1936 to 1939, a freshly elected secular republic backed by most of the nation’s wage-earners, artists and intellectuals battled for its life against a professional army — the Nationalists — that was firmly aligned with the Roman Catholic Church and big landowners, and endowed with advanced aircraft and crack troops from both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. For its defense, the Republic had to draw on an ideological potpourri of untrained but fiercely revolutionary militias, a steady trickle of weapons from the Soviet Union, and some 40,000 volunteers from other nations organized in the Communist-led International Brigades, whose American detachment took the name of “Abraham Lincoln.” The Republican cause never lacked for eloquence to help stoke the romance. In Barcelona, Orwell joined a homegrown semi-Trotskyist militia. Wounded in combat, he went home to write “Homage to Catalonia,” a wise, luminous memoir. Hemingway sent dozens of reports to a United States news service. Then he composed “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” whose stoic American protagonist (based on a real guerrilla leader and played in the 1943 film, inevitably, by Gary Cooper) fights with Spanish guerrillas and sacrifices his life to save his comrades. In “Guernica,” Picasso rendered, in his most famous canvas, the wanton destruction by German bombers of a town whose Basque residents had gathered for market day. Aragon, Auden and Neruda all wrote ­verses to show that the plight of Spain’s embattled republic was close to their hearts. But art is no surrogate for arms and leaders. Gradually, the Nationalist forces commanded by Francisco Franco overwhelmed their outgunned and politically divided adversaries. In the spring of 1939, they captured Madrid and established a dictatorship that endured for almost four decades. The Republic’s defeat, the historical wisdom goes, helped give Hitler the confidence to invade Poland that summer. Adam Hochschild is both a gifted historian and a man of the left. In “Spain in Our Hearts,” he retells this familiar tale in an unfamiliar and convincing way — as a collective biography that strongly sympathizes with the Americans who fought for and wrote about Republican Spain but refuses to spare them from criticism. By assembling a well-chosen set of individual narratives, many about figures who are relatively unknown, he captures why so many people thought the fate of the world might be decided by who won the conflict in a poor, mostly rural country on the edge of Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, limited by neutrality laws and fearful of losing Catholic votes, declined to lift the embargo on sending arms to Spain. That didn’t prevent a remarkable variety of young Americans from enlisting in the cause — most as members of the Lincoln Brigade. There were Communist student leaders like George Watt, who had to swim across a freezing river to escape Nationalist troops. There were sons of privilege, like James Neugass, an ambulance driver from a wealthy New Orleans family whose grandfather had owned slaves. One ­African-American, Oliver Law, a veteran of the United States Army, briefly had charge of the Lincoln Brigade. Hochschild notes, “This was the first time a black man had ever commanded an integrated military unit of Americans in combat.” In Spain, as in nearly every civil war from England in the 1640s to Syria today, savagery was the norm. Both sides routinely killed their prisoners. About a third of the 2,800 “Lincolns” who went to Spain died there. Hochschild, the author of eight books, recognizes that the perception of the war back home was probably more significant than what several thousand leftists could do in Spain. He profiles reporters who were committed either to saving the Republic or destroying it. Martha Gellhorn, a correspondent for Collier’s who was then Hemingway’s lover and later his wife, wrote regularly to Eleanor Roosevelt, a close family friend. Gellhorn also sailed back to Washington to lobby the first lady to change her husband’s mind about the weapons embargo. The New York Times sent a major correspondent to cover each side; neither man made much effort to hide his sympathies. Herbert L. Matthews, who reported from the Republican zone, raged at the routine bombing of civilians in Madrid and elsewhere. Later, recalling the egalitarian spirit of the left, he wrote that Spain “taught us what internationalism means... There one learned that men could be brothers.” Meanwhile, the other Times man, William P. Carney, filled his dispatches with news of Nationalist victories and praise for the officers who led them. Carney even did a propaganda broadcast for a pro-Franco radio station. While he traveled around Spain, he had his mail forwarded to the German Embassy. Hochschild narrates such tales with prose that is consistently vivid yet emotionally restrained. His main contribution is to retell a familiar story with a focus on Americans and an unromantic assessment of why the “good guys” lost, so that he adroitly evokes the commitments of Americans on both sides while eschewing any retrospective cheerleading for the Republic. The only character who shakes his writerly composure is Torkild Rieber, a Norwegian immigrant who was chief executive of Texaco. Rieber admired Hitler and shipped millions of barrels of oil to the Nationalist forces, which meant unilaterally breaking contracts with the Republican government signed before the conflict began. After the onset of World War II in 1939, Rieber hired pro-Nazi assistants who cabled Berlin “coded information about ships leaving New York for Britain and what their cargoes were.” When word of his behavior slipped out, Rieber had to step down from the helm of Texaco. Yet he remained a wealthy and well-connected man with a “fondness for authoritarian leaders” like Franco and the shah of Iran. For its part, the Spanish Republic did not, and perhaps could not, spurn aid from one of the bloodiest dictators of his or any day. To accept Stalin’s assistance, Hochschild makes clear, was a “devil’s bargain” that compromised the government’s image as a beacon of democracy and tolerance. In 1937, Communists loyal to the Kremlin took over and expanded the Republic’s security apparatus. They branded as pro-Fascist the many anarchists and other radicals who sought to create a classless Spain. This intraleft venom touched off a battle in the streets of Barcelona that killed several hundred men who were badly needed at the front. In the aftermath, the government threw alleged “fifth columnists” in prison and executed several leaders. None of the Americans whom Hochschild portrays were directly involved in repressing non-Communists on the left. Still, Hemingway wrote nothing about the brutal squelching of radical dissent. And while some members of the Lincoln Brigade complained privately about stiff-necked dogmatists who sacrificed combat effectiveness at the altar of the Party line, they did not defend their fellow combatants who refused to obey the will of the only foreign power that was giving material support to the struggling Republic. Midway through his captivating narrative, Hochschild takes up the difficult question Orwell pondered and that historians have debated ever since: Did the goal of building a society of brothers and sisters clash with the exigencies of winning the war? In Barcelona and a few other cities, revolutionary workers briefly took control of their factories and abolished such vestiges of the old order as military ranks — and tipping. But none of this helped stop Franco’s advance. As Hochschild sensibly concludes, “to fight a complex, mechanized war, a disciplined army responsible to a central command is far more effective than a range of militias reporting to a crazy quilt of political parties and trade unions.” Perhaps that is the ultimate tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. The Republic had no alternative but to cede a measure of control to Stalin and his minions. Yet doing so only left its defenders embittered and divided and failed to achieve its purpose. Where’s the romance in that? -- Michael Kazin’s next book, “War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918,” will be published next year. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is a co-editor of Dissent. -- www.thursdayfile.com

Pandemic Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond By Sonia Shah Originally Published: February 23, 2016 - 271 pages. Sarah Crichton Books. Her web page: http://soniashah.com/ Sonia Shah Born: 1969 in New York City, USA She is an American investigative journalist and author noted for her articles on corporate power - especially with respect to agriculture, oil and pharmaceutical industries - and on gender equality with specific reference to issues that affect developing countries. Contributes narratives on history programs. Review: ‘Pandemic’ Explains How to Host the Perfect Pathogen Party By Jennifer Senior - February 24, 2016 - http://www.nytimes.com Sometimes, the best approach to a book about deadly pathogens is to read it in a slightly dissociated state — it allows you to marvel at the cunning adaptability of microbial life, rather than contemplate the far creepier possibility of your own doom. In her introduction to “Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond,” Sonia Shah, a science writer whose previous books include “The Fever” and “The Body Hunters,” does not seek shelter in euphemisms or shy away from scary numbers. Instead, she cites a study in which 90 percent of epidemiologists say they believe a global pandemic will sicken one billion and kill up to 165 million within the next two generations. Looking closely at the source of this statistic — a paper by the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant and three colleagues — I’m not convinced that things are quite so dire. (The number of epidemiologists he surveyed is actually quite small.) But there’s no doubt that new forms of pestilence are appearing in the world with an almost metronomic regularity and that old ones are reappearing in new places, the Zika virus being only the most recent example. And pandemics are never pretty. Here is Ms. Shah’s description of what happened to Parisians when they were infected with cholera in 1832: “Fluid blood turned tarry, clotting in the blood stream. Muscles, deprived of oxygen, shuddered so violently that they sometimes tore. As the organs collapsed in turn, victims fell into acute shock, all the while fully conscious and expelling massive amounts of liquid stool.” The good news is that cholera made quick work of its victims. It was said that someone with cholera could feel perfectly fine at dinner and expire by dessert. Yet once you get past the unfriendly statistics of the book’s introduction, and once you get past the chilling biology lesson of Chapter 1 — which explains how these sneaky organisms jump from one species to the next — “Pandemic” is far less terrifying, perhaps because errant microbes are only one component of what makes a pandemic a pandemic. They’re the “known unknowns,” as Donald R. Rumsfeld might put it. The other components are known knowns, which by definition are at least familiar: filth, political corruption, increasing population density and mobility. Ms. Shah uses cholera, one of the most obdurate of pandemics, as a paradigm to explain how new deadly pathogens both emerge and circulate. If you already know something about cholera — if you’ve read Steven Johnson’s excellent “The Ghost Map,” say — you may find yourself disappointed; she covers, inevitably, some of the same ground. But this structuring conceit is also useful for simplifying an unwieldy topic. A discussion about the East India Company’s expansion into the wetlands in the Bay of Bengal, which exposed many Indian workers to the tiny crustaceans that carry vibrio cholera, becomes the perfect segue to discuss how modern deforestation in Guinea encouraged more interaction between people and fruit bats, which are thought to carry Ebola. “As wetlands were paved over and forests were felled, different species came into novel, prolonged contact with each other,” she explains. From a pandemic’s point of view, the more mingling among species the better. For those who don’t know much about the history of cholera, Ms. Shah’s dense, compact book is a decent primer, explaining how new forms of transportation encouraged the spread of this waterborne disease, as did rising urban density, as did political corruption. (It was Aaron Burr who thwarted an attempt to bring clean water from the Bronx River into New York City — as if this man needed any more negative publicity.) Perhaps my favorite chapter, though, is about waste — or, as Ms. Shah puts it, “the rising tide of feculence.” Nothing seems to awaken the muse in Ms. Shah like excreta, the ideal delivery system for all kinds of diseases. In each gram is up to one billion viral particles; yet somehow, Christianity shunned water-based rituals for centuries. Martin Luther went so far as to eat a spoonful of his own feces every day. In 19th-century New York City, sanitation was extravagantly grim. “By 1820,” Ms. Shah writes, “privies and cesspools covered one-twelfth of the city.” Human and horse waste covered the streets and seeped into the groundwater; it was sometimes sold as fertilizer for “sewage farming” in Brooklyn and Queens. The same conditions that drove cholera — overcrowding, corruption, poor hygiene, expanded transportation — are what drive pandemics today. In the age of cholera, shipping trade helped spread disease. Today, it’s air travel — if you want to understand the helter-skelter distribution of flu outbreaks, simply consult a map of airline routes. In the age of cholera, politicians obfuscated and denied their way through the epidemic; today, the World Health Organization, the globe’s dedicated first responder, is so deprived of public funding that its private donors disproportionately control the agenda — which often has nothing to do with controlling pandemics. Today overcrowding is not just in cities, but on farms, which have gotten denser and dirtier. In the United States, they’ve become breeding grounds for E. coli; in China, poultry farms have grown so large they’ve created many opportunities for interactions with wild waterfowl, which can lead to new strains of the flu. Complicating matters is climate change. Warmer waters have washed cholera-rich surf into Alaska and Chile and Iceland. A cold winter altered the migration patterns of wild swans in 2006, which meant they ferried a new flu into more than 20 countries in Europe; an unseasonably warm New York winter in 1999 contributed to the West Nile outbreak. To me, however, the most provocative — and sci-fi — part of Ms. Shah’s book is not about the ways humans have altered the evolution of pandemics. It’s about what the ways pandemics have altered the evolution of humans. Pathogens, Ms. Shah explains, have always been the body’s antagonists. Every time we adapt to combat one, it counter-adapts to harm us back. It is for this reason, she writes, that some evolutionary biologists believe we’ve evolved to have sex, rather than to clone ourselves — by diversifying the gene pool, we’re confounding pathogens, making it harder for them to keep up with our ever-shuffling genetic variations. Ms. Shah ends her book on both a hopeful and cautious note. The cautious note is intriguing: Ms. Shah suggests that the real danger with pandemics is that humans often start to treat them as mere inconveniences, rather than crises (which is how many Africans treat malaria and many Americans treat the flu). As for the optimistic note: I wasn’t buying it. She makes a case for building a worldwide, highly attuned surveillance system. “A network of clinics,” she writes, “staffed with health care workers trained to recognize and report new pathogens, could do the trick.” No doubt it would. But, politically speaking, achieving this goal is about as likely as eradicating pathogens themselves. Now that is scary. -- Notes (Shah's writing, based on original reportage from around the world, from India and South Africa to Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia, has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, as well as on the BBC and Australia's Radio National. A frequent keynote speaker at political conferences, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. Her writing on human rights, medicine, and politics have appeared in a range of magazines from Playboy, Salon, and Orion to The Progressive and Knight-Ridder. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she's consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK. Shah is a former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.) - Between Fear and Hope. 1992. – editor - Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire. – editor - Crude: The Story of Oil. 2004. - The Body Hunters. 2006. - The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years. 2010. - Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. 2016 -- www.thursdayfile.com

Like Family by Paolo Giordano published in 2014 - 146 pages by Viking. published December 1st 2015 by Pamela Dorman Books published in Italian as Il nero e l'argento Translated by Anne Milano Appel. 'Like Family' Rewards The Patient Reader December 03 2015 - review by Heller Mcalpin There are books you need to slow down for in order to appreciate fully. Like Family, Italian physicist-turned-writer Paolo Giordano's third novel, demands to be savored. Race through this short meditation on family, marriage, and devotion – set in motion by the death of a beloved housekeeper — and you'll miss its point: The importance, in our numbingly busy, propulsive lives, of pausing to fully experience the present. Giordano's beautiful first novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, published in 2008 when he was 26, remains a hard act to follow. It opened with a double bang – childhood traumas that shaped his two protagonists. These loners break our hearts repeatedly as they fall in love but discover they're better suited to solitude. His second novel, The Human Body, was set on a forward operating base in Afghanistan and was concerned with the wars we wage publicly and privately. With Like Family, Giordano returns to the domestic front. Once again, he explores loneliness so pervasive that it persists even when one loves someone. But while we feel for these characters, we don't ache for them. The narrator is a socially awkward physicist and academic married to an exuberant, vivacious decorator, Nora, who "flushed" him out of his "hidey-hole." He worries that his neediness "might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite." The couple hire the woman they call Mrs. A. or Babette — after the Isak Dinesen story and the movie based on it — during Nora's difficult first pregnancy, when she is confined to bed. Long widowed after a happy marriage cut short by her husband's kidney failure, Mrs. A. is sensible, robust, and sometimes exasperatingly intransigent. She quickly takes over their household; her employers, more docile charges than bosses, find this comforting. Although she has no experience with children, they keep her on to become their son Emanuele's nanny. The book opens with Mrs. A's death, then circles back in time through her 16-month medical ordeal and the happier days when the couple considered her part of their little family, even though they realized this wasn't exactly accurate. When she gives notice after eight years, claiming fatigue, the narrator and his wife are hurt and distraught. Their son is baffled: "Of the three of us, Emanuele is the only one who has not yet learned that nothing lasts forever when it comes to human relationships," the narrator comments, before adding significantly, "He is also the only one who doesn't know that this is not necessarily a disadvantage." Mrs. A. not only spared them the most tedious household chores, she was their cheering section and the glue that held them together, "a steady element, a haven, an ancient tree with a trunk so massive that even three pairs of arms could not encircle it," Giordano writes. "Mrs. A. was the only real witness of the enterprise we embarked on day after day, the sole observer of the bond that held us together ... In the long run, every love needs someone to witness and acknowledge it, to validate it, or it may turn out to be just a mirage. Without her gaze we felt at risk." It isn't necessary to have experienced the "defection" of a cherished, trusted caregiver to relate to Giordano's story, but it helps. Still, I'm with the narrator's therapist, who gets tired of hearing about Mrs. A. "Now let's forget about the housekeeper. Let's talk about your wife instead," he interrupts impatiently. The therapist is right, of course. What's really eating his patient is the new unobstructed view of his marriage, now that Mrs. A. is gone – and his newfound understanding of just how short on time we all really are. "Nora and I are always so busy, so distracted, so tired," he says. "If these really are our best years, I'm not satisfied with how we're using them." Still in his early 30s, Giordano sure seems to be using his time well. With Like Family, he has created another sober book – his third — about the difficulties of bridging our essential solitude. His vision is more melancholy than mirthful and demands a thoughtful, patient read. But Giordano's emphasis on the pressing importance of how we choose to live and love offers subtle hope that our decisions actually matter. -- Paolo Giordano Born: December 19 1982, Turin, Italy He is an Italian writer who won the Premio Strega literary award with his first novel - The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2008) Giordano was 25 years old)  (published in Italian as La solitudine dei numeri primi) Translated by Shaun Whiteside - The Human Body (2012)  (published in Italian as Il corpo umano) - Like Family (2014)  (published in Italian as Il nero e l'argento) Translated by Anne Milano Appel. -- Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. -------- Related: Review: In Paolo Giordano’s ‘Like Family,’ the Nanny Departs and Cracks Emerge by Jennifer Senior - November 29 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/books/review-in-paolo-giordanos-like-family-the-nanny-departs-and-cracks-emerge.html ------- I write and put together the weekly Thursday File…don’t miss an issue - sign up for free at www.thursdayfile.com - thanks Steve.

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     Pal Joey was written as a series of letters—or short stories—in the magazine The New Yorker in the late 1930s. O'Hara's stories tell of Joey Evans, a second-rate nightclub entertainer in 1930s Chicago, in which he meets and falls in love with the woman "Linda." In a series of letters to "dear Pal Ted" from "Pal Joey," he reveals himself to be an amoral, calculating heel whose venality is cloaked by an amiable persona. Joey's letters are written in literate but uneducated English:    Dear Friend Ted    That is if I can call you friend after the last two weeks for it is a hard thing to do considering. I do not know if you realize what has happen to me oweing to your lack of consideration [sic]. Maybe it is not lack of consideration [sic]. Maybe it is on purpose. Well if it is on purpose all I have to say is maybe you are the one that will be the loser and not me as I was going to do certan things for you but now it does not look like I will be able to do them.... ---------------- Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered November 16, 2015 | by Thomas Mallon John O’Hara’s Pal Joey remains an exemplar of a rare form: the epistolary novella. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/16/bewitched-bothered-and-bewildered -- please join me each week on the Thursday File - www.thursdayfile.com

“Whenever a crowd is running one way. I run the other way.” - Robert Harris -------- DICTATOR By Robert Harris 385 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. Book I: Imperium, 2006 - the first novel in a trilogy Book II: Lustrum, 2000 - the second novel in the Cicero trilogy Book III: Dictator, 2015 - the third novel. ------------------ Dictator by Robert Harris review – a remarkable literary achievement The third part of Harris’s Cicero trilogy is a fine portrait of the great Roman’s last years Review by  Stephanie Merritt - October 18 2015 - http://www.theguardian.com Dictator, the third instalment in Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels following the rise and fall of the Roman statesman and orator Cicero, marks the culmination of 12 years of work and a remarkable literary achievement in the marshalling and distillation of the source material alone. Those turbulent years of the first century BC that saw the collapse of the Roman republic and the transition to empire remain one of the best-documented periods of classical history, and so many of Cicero’s writings have survived that Harris is able to blend his hero’s own words seamlessly with invented conversations to create a full-blooded and authentic portrait of this extraordinary politician and philosopher. Unlike the previous book, Lustrum (2009), which began with the discovery of a murder, Dictator opens less obviously in the thriller mode, though its pace is no less relentless, as Harris takes us at a clip through the 15 years between Cicero’s exile in 58BC, as a result of the Cataline conspiracy detailed in Lustrum, and his eventual death in 43BC. Those years, Harris explains in his author’s note, are “arguably – at least until the convulsions of 1933-45 – the most tumultuous era in human history”, as the Roman republic governed by the triumvirate of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus fragments into civil war under the pressure of Caesar’s ambition. Like its two predecessors, Dictator is narrated by Cicero’s slave and amanuensis, Tiro, who outlived his master, invented a form of shorthand and really did write a multi-volume biography of Cicero. This lost work lends authenticity to the familiar literary device of presenting the hero through the eyes of the lower-status companion who knows him best. But Harris makes his Tiro an engaging character in his own right; shadowing Cicero through the corridors of power, he offers a wry commentary on the machinations of great men and is not above questioning his master’s judgments, though he notes early on: “How easy it is for those who play no part in public affairs to sneer at the compromises of those who do.” For much of this period, Cicero is obliged to compromise just to stay alive. As the balance of power shifts in Rome, he often finds himself at one remove from the heart of the action, either in exile or effective exile, sent to govern a distant province or made to give assurance that he will take no further part in political life – a promise he finds impossible to keep for long, though these forced retreats afford him time to write and allow his family relationships to come to the fore. Of these, the most engaging is with his daughter, Tullia, to whom he is devoted; she is the most fully realised female character in what is perhaps inevitably an almost entirely male book, but these glimpses of Cicero’s home life humanise and ground his character. Throughout the trilogy, Harris has presented Cicero as an honourable man who thrives on the danger and adrenaline of public life, but whose motivation is always, ultimately, a belief in the republic and its values. Nowhere is this duty, courage and honour more evident than in the novel’s final section, as Cicero bursts back on to the political stage after the assassination of Caesar and briefly regains his former glory as he makes one last bid to shore up the republic against the threat of Mark Antony. Harris ratchets up the pace here so that, even though we know Cicero’s fate, there is a compulsive tension in watching him hurtle unstoppably towards it. Harris’s style is a curious blend of contemporary idiom (Pompey and Crassus are said to stand for election “on a joint ticket”) with Latin vocabulary so precise it requires a separate glossary; while the modern language may jar with historical purists, the research underpinning it is so meticulous that the reader feels wholly absorbed into Cicero’s world, and this is Harris’s real achievement. Dictator is a fitting finale to a trilogy that is likely to stand alongside the works of Robert Graves and Mary Renault as an enduring imaginative vision of the ancient world. -- www.thursdayfile.com

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Photo I: Marshall Button as New Brunswick millworker Lucien Photo II: Map of the Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe -- Federal Election 2015: Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe Conservative: Robert Goguen, MP since 2011 NDP: Luc LeBlanc, Professor, Université de Moncton Liberal: Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Victim Services Coordinator, RCMP Green: Luc Melanson, specialist at Dovico Software Summary: The smallest of New Brunswick’s ten ridings and a tight three-way race in 2011, Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe is considered a riding to watch in this election. Boundaries: This largely urban riding is slightly smaller for 2015, with the eastern-most portion, including Lakeburn, moving into the Beausejour riding. Last Election: Conservative Robert Goguen defeated two-term Liberal MP Brian Murphy by 4.4 per cent. The NDP candidate, Shawna Gagné, was just 3,355 votes back of Goguen. History: The Liberal party held this seat for 23 years, until Goguen’s win in 2011. Traditionally a battle between the Liberals and Conservatives, the NDP showed a strong gain here in 2011 to make it a three-way race. Demographics: French was the mother tongue of 33.1 per cent of people in the 2011 census, fourth highest in New Brunswick. The median age is 40.5, second lowest in New Brunswick. --- www.Thursdayfile.com

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The Order of the Owls (Minerva Mint #1) by Elisa Puricelli Guerra As a baby Minerva Mint was found in a travel bag in the waiting room of a London train station, together with the deed to a rundown mansion called Lizard Manor, and for nine years she has been living there with Geraldine Flopps, the former station custodian who found her--now, together with two new friends, she is determined to find her true identity. Hardcover, 154 pages Published February 1st 2014 by Capstone Press(MN) (first published December 1st 2013)

Poultry Suite Photographs by Jean Pagliuso -- Distributed for Hirmer Publishers, 112 pages, 2015 -- With Contributions by Ralph Gibson, April Gornik, Clifford Ross, Maya Lin, Eric Fischl, and Joan Tewkesbury - 45 halftones, 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 -- Jean Pagliuso is a world-class fashion photographer whose photographs of fashion models and film stars from Susan Sarandon to Sophia Loren filled the pages of Vogue and Rolling Stone for nearly three decades. But for her most recent work, Pagliuso trained her lens on a much less conventional subject: the chicken. An homage to her childhood in Southern California, where she helped her father breed and show Bantam Cochins, Poultry Suite showcases more than twenty breeds of chickens—from Sebrights to Spangled Hamburgs—as they have never before been seen.   Just as in conventional fashion photography, Pagliuso has applied her well-developed eye to creating interesting compositions while also bringing out each subject’s unique beauty and personality. In one photograph, a plump hen stares head-on at the camera through a mass of white feathers. In another, a proud red-combed rooster turns to peer curiously at the camera. Each portrait in Poultry Suite features a chicken arranged against a simple background, encouraging viewers to explore the animals’ anthropomorphic traits. The photographs are complemented by an accessible collection of texts. Carefully designed by Shahid and Company, New York, and with reproductions of nearly fifty photographs, Poultry Suite impeccably applies the aesthetic excellence of fashion photography to form a true appreciation of the diversity of these birds. --Review quotes: Artforum, on the exhibition “Leave it to an artist to transform a barnyard animal into a thing of beauté.” New York Times, on the exhibition “Believe me, these bird portraits are magnificent works of art. . . . Pagliuso, a former fashion and commercial portrait photographer, has an eye for the traits that are peculiar to each bird. . . . She has endowed her subjects with nobility.” Paris Review "Jean Pagliuso takes pictures of chickens. It’s a risky subject—to hear about it, you’d worry you were dealing with the same kitschy, quasi-ironic veneration of farm and fowl that animates many an Etsy shop—but there’s nothing decorative or trite about these portraits. . . .They’re chickens and owls, sure. But they’re . . . elegant. And in the time of 'Put a Bird on It!,' that’s a remarkable thing." --Review: Portraits of Contemplative and Cocky Poultry by Claire Voon on September 3, 2015 For most of her four-decade-long career, photographer Jean Pagliuso focused her lens on the fashion industry and on Hollywood, producing images of celebrities meant for magazines and movie posters. Her latest series, which began last year, spotlights a wholly different, unexpected model: the chicken. Framing each fowl alone, Pagliuso has captured these birds with remarkable, individual expression, inviting us to take a much closer look at the common species. Her images were previously on view at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York, but they are now gathered in Poultry Suite, a book recently released by the University of Chicago Press. Featuring nearly 50 black-and-white photographs of over 20 breeds of chickens, Poultry Suite presents the simple winged creature as one would a sitter in a studio. Pagliuso adopts the traditional style of the formal portrait, devoting each page to one bird shown against a plain background, full-bodied or closely cropped to its face. It’s surprising to flip through the pages and find oneself mesmerized by a usually overlooked creature, but Pagliuso’s poultry seem to have emotions. A black rooster with a gleaming eye appears cocky (pun unintended); a white one, with its sharp comb resembling the plates of a stegosaurus, gazes stoically away as if lost in thought. The birds’ plumages, though natural, also transform through Pagliuso’s lens into costumes that present them as exotic avians. Some are amusing, with extravagant headpieces; others are simply beautiful, with variegated feathers that resemble the patterns of stained glass windows. Granted, these are no ordinary chickens but rather the prized show birds Pagliuso helped her father breed in California; still, it takes a certain mastery of the photographic medium to render an animal usually recognized as food or farm resident with such dignity and mystery. Eric Fischl notes in one of the publication’s many accompanying texts that the works are reminiscent of August Sander‘s portraits in that they adhere to strict documentation. Still, the gossamer texture of Pagliuso’s images, printed on soft, Japanese rice paper, have an illusory quality that bring to mind even portraits from the Victorian era. Portraits of animals are, of course, not novel, but rarely are they elevated, with such subtlety, to possess a natural nobleness. Although working in another medium, British painter George Stubbs is one who accomplished this as well, long before Pagliuso. Choosing most often the horse as his model (a series of these works is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art > http://www.metmuseum.org ), he studied its anatomy closely to paint his steeds with realistic detail while still invigorating them with personality. Both his works and Pagliuso’s are not overly anthropomorphic, and it is this fine straddling of hard reality and open possibility that makes their sitters so magnetic. -- www.thursdayfile.com