{"id":71947,"date":"2022-12-17T01:25:54","date_gmt":"2022-12-17T06:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71947"},"modified":"2023-02-19T03:54:29","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T08:54:29","slug":"tom-bowdens-top-12-of-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/12\/17\/tom-bowdens-top-12-of-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Bowden’s Top 12 of 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Republic of False Truths<\/strong><\/a>
\nAlaa Al Aswany \/ S. R. Fellowes
\nVintage<\/p>\n

Beginning on the eve of the Tahrir Square uprising during Egypt\u2019s winter 2011, The Republic of False Truths <\/strong>relates a Dickensian tale of the events from the points of view of members of all societal levels, men and women, Muslims and Copts, orally and in writing, for and against the uprising, and those who must be shocked into choosing sides from their positions of cynical ironic distance. For all the novel\u2019s characters, religious ideals form the basis for the rationales of their moral decisions. At stake is the significant difference between the letter and the spirit of the law, the former prone to opportunistic hypocrisy and corruption, the latter open to discussion and collaboration.<\/p>\n

Ten years on and it\u2019s clear that politically, things are back to the Mubarak status quo. The Republic of False Truths<\/strong> suggests that options for the Tahrir revolutionaries are exile, vengeance, or apathy. The book is filled with hope, despite the atrocities committed by the Egyptian government against its own people, and anger\u2014aimed as much at the apathetic Egyptian majority as at Mubarak\u2019s regime. Those who stay and those who remain have equally compelling reasons for their actions, and no easy answer to expelling the systemic rot that leaves so many of Aswany\u2019s protagonists anguished.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Passenger<\/a><\/strong>
\nUlrich Alexander Boschwitz (Philip Boehm, trans.)
\nMetropolitan Books<\/p>\n

Begun the day after Kristalnacht and finished four weeks later, The Passenger is both an impassioned response to Germany\u2019s assault on its Jewish citizens and a prescient observation on what was to come, following the Nazi government\u2019s agenda to its logical conclusion, well before it was implemented with ruthless efficiency.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s protagonist, Otto Silberman, is a well-to-do tradesman married to a Christian, living a secular life. Adding to Silberman\u2019s good fortune at the novel\u2019s outset is his lack of physical traits seen as stereotypically Jewish. But as the book begins, his negotiations quickly go south with a man he has worked with before, but for whom the current nationwide hostilities toward Jews has encouraged to negotiate in terms of pfennigs on the mark. That deal is interrupted when the police arrive, and Otto is forced to go on the lam out the back door.<\/p>\n

Separated from his family (his son lives in Paris, his wife escapes to live with her Nazi brother), Otto spends most of the book (in ominous prescience) travelling around Germany on trains for three days, looking for a way out of the country, only to find closed off every avenue of escape. While his trip shows him that not every non-Jew is complacent with the Nazi regime, he quickly discovers even in himself an abhorrence toward fellow Jews who now suddenly seem obvious, drawing attention to themselves, and clingy. (See Cynthia Ozick\u2019s The Shawl, written decades later, about this.)<\/p>\n

Without money, exhausted from his non-stop travels, lack of sleep and decent food, Silberman tries suicide by cop without success. For that, he will need the help of his fellow Germans.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Motley Stones<\/a><\/strong>
\nAdlabert Stifter \/ Isabel Fargo Cole
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

The narrators of these stories\u2014the motley stones\u2014are several generations removed from their tales, provided as descriptions of persons of remarkable character. Written in the mid-1800s, Stifter\u2019s tales occur probably around the turn of the 18th century, when Germanic nations were primarily rural, and even the biggest cities were modestly sized by today\u2019s standards. Although the natural world is lavishly described throughout, with eyes and insight worthy of Thoreau, Stifter is primarily interested in inflexible eccentricities. Stifter\u2019s narrators clearly admire these people while also acknowledging that some readers may find them mere fools, while others\u2014like the narrators\u2014are marked for life by the encounters.<\/p>\n

One such example is the nameless, ascetic parson in the story \u201cLimestone.\u201d (Spoiler alert!) The parson has a secret cause he\u2019s been stowing away money for\u2014to build, for safety reasons, a new school for the local children. For decades he scrimps and sacrifices, living just above beggary level. Late in the story, after he dies and his will is read, his bequest to the community is revealed\u2014as is the fact that his 30+ years of savings isn\u2019t nearly enough to cover costs. The well-to-do in the area rise to the occasion and raise the funds necessary to fulfill the requirements of the parson\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

Stifter does, or did, have his detractors for his attention to small people of small significance. And I can imagine them saying about \u201cLimestone,\u201d \u201cGood lord. Generations of parents risked their children drowning to reach school during deluges on the floodplain. And even though the area had been settled for centuries, it wasn\u2019t until an outsider to the community\u2014the parson\u2014noticed a much safer location for the school already existed\u2014but he didn\u2019t say a word about it until after his death. Who are these people?\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s Stifter\u2019s attention to minutiae that makes his writing fascinating, so that 50-page story about a boy punished for walking in the house with greased feet becomes a compelling meditation on geography, landscape, history, and human relationships in small communities. Even if we don\u2019t understand a character\u2019s motivation (Why does a cuckolded husband take his daughter and leave a community after his wife has run away? Why does he resign them to a life of poverty, living in the basement of a dilapidated apartment building?), the reactions these characters elicit in the other characters often brings out the best in human compassion. Stifter may be an idealist\u2014not for acting as if the world is nothing but pureness and light\u2014but for insisting there is more inherent good than evil in the world, and that goodness eventually irons out the bad.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>
\nX-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction<\/a><\/strong>
\nThomas Moynihan
\nUrbanomic<\/p>\n

A fascinating, wide-ranging intellectual history of an idea whose consequences we\u2019re just beginning to grapple with, X-Risk traces the history of how humanity became self-conscious of its ability to bring the planet\u2019s biota to the point of the extinction, a history beginning with the sense of humanity\u2019s own ending via apocalypse or extinction.<\/p>\n

While apocalypse is spiritual, moral, and God-determined; extinction is material, amoral, and human-determined. In apocalypse only the evil suffer; in extinction, everybody suffers. The apocalyptic asserts an entire cosmos structured according to moral principles and truths, populated by Earth-like creatures, including and especially humanoids. Extinction asserts through evidence that as conscious, technologically savvy beings, we are alone in the universe, have only one chance on Earth, and are likely to die out sooner or later, no matter what we do.<\/p>\n

As material evidence about the Earth\u2019s lands and seas accumulated over the course of 150 years or so, the religious assumption that human-like life populated the Earth\u2019s oceans and core (and by extension the entire universe) was replaced by the fact that it\u2019s mostly inorganic matter all the way down. As measured in sentient life, God\u2019s abundance and goodness were shown to be in short supply.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, once the ability to age rocks arose and knowledge acquired of the materials and forces required of their formation, geologists could then demonstrate the existence of a vast, \u201cdeep time\u201d in the past\u2014but a past with a moment of origin rather than one that has eternally existed, as had been believed.<\/p>\n

Discontinuities among fossils with contemporary fauna also demonstrated that extinction of entire species had occurred in the past and will likely occur in the future. Reports coming from the New World during the 18th- and 19th-centuries indicated that humans were also currently hunting to extinction native birds and mammals.<\/p>\n

Theological assumptions of eternal cycles of death and renewal, of eternal plentitude everywhere, had been cut at both ends, past and future. Replacing a sense of eternal plentitude was the realization that everything is on a one-way trip to oblivion.<\/p>\n

Once the fact of a changing but a-cyclical material history was established among sciences from biology to geology, the discovery in mathematics of calculus and the establishment of probability theory allowed the prediction of future events. At one point in human development, deviations from daily norms were interpreted as unpredictable acts of God (or the Devil). But now, physical forces of change\u2014past and future, planetary and cosmic\u2014could be determined and the mechanisms behind deviations explained and predicted.<\/p>\n

Debates within the sciences, and the physical records they were based upon, were mediated by various philosophers, British Romantic poets, and prescient French novelists, who also all began predicting what the future holds in store for humanity (something unhappy) and why and how (or if) that direction should be changed.<\/p>\n

But notions of \u201cbetter future\u201d indicate that, if minimizing human misery is the goal of technology and ideological systems, then not being born would be in the best interests of all people. Once the likelihood of humanity\u2019s extinction was established and the misery of human existence universally acknowledged, proposals for omnicide began popping up in philosophy and the sciences. Some omniciders argue for accelerating the natural course of human extinction, rationalized as doing the universe a favor, arguments earnestly presented by anti-natalists as an overall moral good. Moynihan is not one of their supporters.<\/p>\n

Nor does he endorse a future in which humans evolve toward some form of drug-induced pleasure-stupor, coddled by technology designed to perpetuate our existence.<\/p>\n

Insofar as we have any Lamarckian abilities to steer the course of our otherwise Darwinian (aka aimless) evolution, Moynihan argues that we should aim to live above mere survival level that happy droolers inhabit and equip ourselves with a life vocation: Once the bare minimum to survive has been satisfied, our remaining physical and mental efforts should be used toward achieving perfection in some skill.<\/p>\n

Or if achieving, say, Olympic-contender greatness isn\u2019t among the skills a person wants to develop, they can work instead to use technology to devise ways to help humans live with and correct the world-wide ecological disaster currently unfolding. Unlike other species, Moynihan argues, we have the ability and should do what we can to sustain and perpetuate ourselves, and as much other life as we can, too.<\/p>\n

While I would counter that every well-engineered solution is also a well-engineered problem, correcting our path as we go along may be our only chance for longer survival, even if every solution proves temporary, creating new problems in its wake.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets<\/a><\/strong>
\nWanda Coleman
\nBlack Sparrow Press<\/p>\n

Originally published in sections across various of her poetry collections, Heart First into This Ruin <\/strong>finally collects into one volume the complete 100 American Sonnets, Coleman\u2019s contribution to the sonnet form and the aesthetic expression of her experiences as a Black woman in America, un-degreed and unmarried\u2014experiences simultaneously singular and familiar, unique and shared, compressed to 14 lines (the only formal element her sonnets share with traditional sonnets). The lines and stanza lengths vary from poem to poem, suggesting that Coleman tries to tailor each poem\u2019s meter to its subject, the way it is talked about, described. And this she does very well, covering family, erotic love, work, chronic poverty, racism, and the damned knowledge that she is better than what she receives from American society.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Coleman in meditative form, \u201cAmerican Sonnet #76\u201d:<\/p>\n

there be the fog outside and the fog inside
\nsettling over the gravesites and skin
\nclimate fit for ghosts and amnesiacs, befogged,
\nintrusive skirtings thru filters, cracks
\nand secret spots, mist forming at my lover\u2019s
\nkiss in the pretty air, the kiss hovering and diving
\nbefore it strikes me. mist oceanflow from resistance to
\npeace time, mist taking root in the brown chair at the
\npine desk, composing, there is internal fog and external
\nfog. a garden of spirits and drums, sprites
\nthrilling on the ooze, of firs, walking naked, cold and
\nhungry for smoke, the east, want borne on wickedness like
\na shot, or kiss, before diving into blankets and history
\nto embrace the fog to give it form and flesh<\/p>\n

An essential collection of American poetry from the late 20th century.<\/p>\n