{"id":73964,"date":"2025-04-22T15:36:35","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T19:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73964"},"modified":"2025-04-22T15:36:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T19:36:35","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-57-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2025\/04\/22\/i-arrogantly-recommend-57-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… #57 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nI arrogantly recommend…<\/a> is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If you notice titles unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Running Flame<\/a><\/strong>
\nFang Fang \/ Michael Berry
\nColumbia University Press<\/p>\n

Taking place in the 1990s, after China\u2019s turn to capitalism was in full swing\u2014and along with it the reemergence of brutal patriarchy, which had been simmering in the background during the all-too-brief flirtation with the feminism encapsulated by Mao\u2019s adage, \u201cWomen hold up half the sky\u201d\u2014The Running Flame novelizes the fates of too many women living in China\u2019s countryside (and the city, too). Under traditional, Confucian patriarchy, daughters-in-law are expected to wait on their in-laws hand and foot, as well as the son she married, raise and tend to their children, keep the house tidy, the meals ready, the animals fed, their pens cleaned, and the vegetable garden hoed and weeded. Once a woman leaves her parent\u2019s home to enter her husband\u2019s home, her parents regard her as water thrown out the window. She becomes, quite literally, her husband\u2019s and in-laws\u2019 property to do with as they see fit. Even today in China, domestic abuse is no guarantee that a divorce will be granted\u2014it depends on whether the husband agrees to it. Same with male but not female infidelity.<\/p>\n

But during China\u2019s one-child policy, daughters could now receive a college education instead of the son who was never born. How are ya gonna keep on the farm once they\u2019ve seen Paree?<\/p>\n

The Running Flame<\/em> concerns the fate of a young woman named Yingzhi, who is in prison when we first meet her, awaiting her execution for the murder of her husband. (A note on capital punishment in China: The average amount of time between being charged with a capital crime and being executed for that crime is about one month: no time for extenuating circumstances, recanted testimony, exculpating DNA evidence, and so forth to wend its way through the court system to overturn a decision. In the novel, Yingzhi learns that the last woman to have the cell she now occupies was there five months.) How did she get there?<\/p>\n

Yingzhi\u2019s story begins with her high school graduation. She did well in school, was studious, got good grades, and understood the material well enough to tutor her friends who didn\u2019t understand it. Still, she\u2019s not interested in going to college, nor is she interested in hard labor\u2014about the only type of work available in rural China. A friend of her family\u2019s, who runs a successful band that plays at weddings and funerals, asks Yingzhi if she would like to sing in his band\u2014she\u2019s pretty and has a good voice. She agrees, is immediately popular, and quickly realizes that just from singing and dancing a couple of times a week, she could make up to the U.S. equivalent of about $50 a month, with another $6 or $7 a month for her parents. This is the countryside version of bright-lights-big-city income.<\/p>\n

Early in her new success, she meets a young man named Guiqing, who compliments her on her beauty and singing. They begin a courtship that quickly results in Yingzhi\u2019s pregnancy and an early marriage. For her marriage gift, she wants from Guiqing a house with indoor plumbing. He demurs by saying the money would be better spent on raising their soon-to-be-born son. She agrees to it, not realizing until after the marriage that because their son obtained Yingzhi so cheaply, she must not be worth very much as a person. And so, the antagonisms with her in-laws begins, including their insistence on naming the baby the English equivalent of \u201ctrash,\u201d assuming that it will inspire him to rise above his name, at which point they can re-named him. That\u2019s something they did with Guiqing\u2014the son who can do no wrong, just as much as he will do no labor but instead spends his time drinking, gambling, and whoring. Money is a matter for Yingzhi to make.<\/p>\n

Since it is up to Yingzhi to make money, she uses this as leverage to get permission to sing in the band again. Her hope is that within two years, she will have saved 2,000 yuan ($275), enough to build a house. However, Guiqing takes the money to pay off his gambling debts and his parents continue to shame her for daring to ask that he work. Soon, too, the beatings start, as does Yingzhi\u2019s infidelity. Once her infidelity is discovered, Guiqing\u2019s parents demand her death.<\/p>\n

Fang Fang\u2019s The Running Flame<\/em> is a stark but honest assessment of the lives lead by too many women still in China, whether they live in the country or the city. Yingzhi\u2019s desires for herself are astonishingly modest by urban standards: Just a small place to live, with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a washing machine. And the freedom to leave whenever she wants.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Screaming at the Window: The tragic story of Blanche Monnier, the Prisoner of Poitiers<\/a><\/strong>
\nR. J. Dent
\nKernpunkt Press<\/p>\n

In late 19th century Poitiers, France, lived an upper-middle class family, the Monniers. The father, \u00c9mile Monnier, was a successful professor of literature at a nearby university. His wife, Louise, claimed to have royalty as distant relatives, and conducted her expectations of her children accordingly. The eldest, Marcel, was a pedantic and spineless dweeb whose first job out of law school was given to him as a favor to his father. He never rose in rank. His younger sister, Blanche, was vivacious, strong-willed, and musically talented in youth. But all of that went south in her early twenties, when Blanche\u2019s mother discovered she was in love with a lawyer whose station in life and long-term prospects were not to Louise\u2019s liking.<\/p>\n

Initially, Blanche was pulled out of school and confined to her bedroom on the second floor of the house. However, the Monnier\u2019s maids noticed that Blanche had taken up the practice of dropping out her window a note in an envelope, which her suitor would open and read while Blanche stood in front of her window, stripped off her clothes, and gyrated. As a result, the windows were shuttered, and the shutters padlocked from the outdoors. This measure did not succeed into transforming Blanche into the docile creature Louise hoped for.<\/p>\n

Thus, Madame Monnier convinced the family doctor that Blanche needed help for her erratic behavior. He prescribed a daily dose of potassium bromide, which impairs memory formation and\u2014long-term (exactly what Madame Mollier wanted for Blanche)\u2014leads to \u201cconfusion, semi-coma, anxiety attacks, neurosis, and paranoia,\u201d as well as \u201cdepression, lethargy, somnolence . . ., loss of reflexes . . . delirium . . . abnormal speech,\u201d and so forth. This fact alone seems to be author R. J. Dent\u2019s major discovery in the criminal case, which arose, in large part, from the side effects on Blanche Monnier of twenty-five years of daily potassium bromide ingestion.<\/p>\n

Blanche\u2019s behavior became erratic, veering from violent to withdrawn. Eventually, the potassium bromide made her incontinent, and her mattress was allowed to rot (on Louise\u2019s orders), sheets removed of feces but not washed. There was no light in her room. By the time she was found, her weight was down to 51 lbs.<\/p>\n

Over the years, neighbors heard screams from Blanche\u2019s room. A couple of attempts were made to investigate the complaints, but the authorities were violently repelled by Madame Monnier and did not follow up. Because of the stench from Blanche\u2019s darkened room, where the door was always closed, upon Madame Monnier\u2019s direction, keeping maids became increasingly difficult, especially after the longest-serving maid died. Madame Monnier had succeeded in keeping her in service by keeping her in drink. During these years, too, Blanche\u2019s brother, Marcel, came to visit, almost every day, sometimes several times a day. Although he suggested to his mother that Blanche might be better taken care of in a nursing home, his mother would absolutely have none of that. Marcel was reluctant to argue with his mother: She had already legally maneuvered him out of what he should have been paid from his father\u2019s will, why make matters worse?<\/p>\n

Time catches up with Louise Monnier, as it always does: And, as the elderly do, she sickens, strangers come in the house, unpleasant discoveries are made, as are arrests\u2014Louise and Marcel Monnier\u2014and a skin-on-bone Blanche is transported to a hospital. Public outrage follows. Louise dies on her sickbed in jail. Her son, Marcel, is tried for the violence done to his sister, and is found guilty.<\/p>\n

However, the appeals court recognized a distinction in the law between acts of commission and acts of omission. Marcel was morally guilty of acts of omission but innocent of crimes of commission. The law\u2014the letter of the French law at the time\u2014explicitly stated that acts of commission were punishable but was silent on matter of omission. The prosecution in the criminal court had argued, by analogy, that the results from acts of omission could be just as reprehensible as those results from acts of commission. But the appeals court acted more conservatively in its decision than did the criminal court, which had sentenced Marcel Monnier to 15 months in prison.<\/p>\n

Marcel\u2019s public reputation was ruined, and he and his wife retired to the French countryside. The court awarded him his mother\u2019s trove of hoarded cash and her estate (together worth about $15 million today). Blanche was eventually moved to a psychiatric hospital, paid for by money from her mother\u2019s estate. She never recovered her intellectual functions after so many years of being sedated, remaining at the mental level of about a three-year-old, and withdrew into herself once in the hospital, where she lived another eleven years, dying at age 63, just four months after her brother.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Almost True<\/a><\/strong>
\nClarice Lispector \/ Benjamin Moser, story; Carla Irusta, illustrations
\nThe Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit<\/a><\/strong>
\nClarice Lispector \/ Benjamin Moser, story; Kammal Jo\u00e3o, illustrations
\nNYRB Kids<\/p>\n

In her children\u2019s stories, as her works for adults, Clarice Lispector\u2019s narrators in Almost True<\/em> and The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit<\/em> adopt a just-so tone, a shrugged \u201cit\u2019s just how they are,\u201d but for children the tone is presented as wryly ironic. Both books feature characters\u2014a rabbit in one, a dog in the other\u2014that find themselves with the unusual ability to think\u2014a quality unexpected of them by others, and so a field of personal development often left fallow, but our heroes discover that ideas can come in handy for solving problems and making oneself happy.<\/p>\n

Originally written for her sons (and marketed for children ages 5 to 9) both Almost<\/em> and Rabbit<\/em> are structured for give-and-take between storyteller and audience (i.e., kids), from audience participation to addressing its ability to suspend its disbelief at what they are told is true, or almost true, nicely rendered by Lispector\u2019s biographer and long-time translator Benjamin Moser.<\/p>\n

From Almost True<\/em>\u2019s introduction to two key players in the story: \u201cThe rooster\u2019s name was Evidio. The \u2018E\u2019 came from egg, the \u2018vidio\u2019 was just because he felt like it. The hen was named Edissea. The \u2018E\u2019 was because of egg and the \u2018dissea\u2019 was just because she felt like it.\u201d But this turns out to be the general naming practice of the fowl in the community. The story also has a lot of throat-clearing (in the form of an overlong introduction) from its narrator, a household dog named Ulisses, whose incessant barking has been faithfully transcribed by Clarice into the story we are about to read\u2014it\u2019s not until a quarter through the book that the story proper begins, but not without a final sputter: \u201cAt this point, you must be complaining and asking: Where\u2019s the story? Bear with me, the story\u2019s going to storify. And right this second. This is how it starts\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The rabbit is kept in a cage by a family in their house. Because the family sometimes forgot to feed him, he discovers\u2014through the power of thinking\u2014of a way to escape, so he can go outside and find something to eat. Quickly found and returned, the rabbit is now well and consistently fed. However, he misses the outdoors and makes escaping part of his routine. The family wants to solve the mystery of how he keeps escaping. Lispector makes clear to children that there are limits to what one may demand of an author.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect traditional narrative arcs to these stories: Just as a particular problem faced by the protagonist is solved (or seems resolved), the story meanders to another issue. Or, in the case of The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit<\/em>, the mystery remains a mystery. It\u2019s the other facets to the rabbit\u2019s life that make its winding story interesting. Carla Irusta and Kammal Jo\u00e3o, both Brazilian illustrators, offer their colorful interpretations of Lispector\u2019s whimsical prose, succeeding, too, in conveying the childlike nature of the stories\u2019 inventiveness and their disregard for verisimilitude.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The River<\/a><\/strong>
\nLaura Vinogradova \/ Kaija Straumanis
\nOpen Letter<\/p>\n

A short, affecting novel about coming to terms with loss and the ability to trust and love. Two girls, Dina and Rute, are raised by a dissolute mother who goes from man to man, their father a specter from the past their mother only complains about and they never see. As adults, in their late 20s, Dina suddenly disappears. Only the readers know she has been abducted, presumably to be gang raped and murdered. Ten years on, Rute discovers that her biological father has died and that she has inherited his house in the countryside.<\/p>\n

Without saying a word to her husband, Stefans, she decides to visit her father\u2019s house and spend the summer there. She\u2019s closed in on herself, initially speaks almost not at all to anybody, and writes letters every day to the disappeared Dina, providing readers with an emotional weather report of her inner life. Nearby live an adult brother and sister. As with Dina and Rute, the brother\u2019s and sister\u2019s parents wanted nothing to do with them, but the brother, Kristofs, bonds with J?les, Dina and Rute\u2019s father. Rute discovers that her father has a local reputation as a kind person, a good Samaritan who took or aided any and all in need. Because of this history, Kristofs and his sister, Matilde, already feel a welcoming compassion for Rute when she arrives. Rute reluctantly accepts their acts of kindness, benevolent behavior that begins to draw Rute out from her ten-year immersion into morbid uncertainty, exacerbated by her estranged mother\u2019s imprisonment for murdering, in her own self-defense, the man she was living with at the time.<\/p>\n

With delicacy, Latvian author Laura Vinogradova shows, in Kaija Straumanis\u2019s fine translation, how Rute slowly pieces together again\u2014or perhaps for the first time\u2014her sense of self, her sense of herself as somebody who matters to and affects the lives of others, the sense that her re-emergence will be painful, good, and necessary.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Berlin<\/a><\/strong>
\nAndris Kupri\u0161s \/ Ian Gwin
\nOpen Letter<\/p>\n

A collection of short stories from the Latvian writer Andris Kupri\u0161s, translated into smoothly idiomatic English by Ian Gwin. Berlin<\/em>\u2019s stories involve protagonists in situations of charged but unresolved emotions between parent and child, student and teacher, mutual strangers, and lovers.<\/p>\n

Melancholy underpins these stories, as does ambiguity of motivation. A man wakes up in a hospital, in a ward for patients with psychological problems. (A schizophrenic with a Jesus complex is in the bed next to his.) He is told only that he drank too much and that he needs a few days to recover. Was this a botched suicide attempt? Was it carelessness? Uncertainty and indecision haunt many of Berlin\u2019s stories. A similar situation is before the protagonist of another story:<\/p>\n

What had happened? I wanted to know. I don\u2019t like the feeling of not knowing what happened. I like to know that I can influence a situation, that my actions have some sway. I feel safer when I do, though I don\u2019t really think of myself as cowardly. I\u2019m not afraid of the dark at all. I\u2019m also not afraid of spiders. Or God. But the unknown, I am afraid of that. I like having options. I like to have an escape.<\/p>\n

But options and escape plans are qualities Berlin\u2019s protagonists usually lack. The title story, making up more than the last third of the book, combines the faulty characteristics of the other protagonists and manages to transcend them. Something hopeful arises from the anomie.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Messengers<\/a><\/strong>
\nGeorges-Olivier Ch\u00e2teaureynaud \/ Edward Guavin
\nWakefield Press<\/p>\n

An unnamed lad walks into a rural village as night falls (\u201cnot \u2026 from above so much as seep from the trees and thin in the air like a cloud of ink in a glass of water\u201d), where he meets a young woman, hunchbacked with one bad eye, who tells the young man to follow her but keep silent. They come to a clearing by a farmhouse where a party with food and music is underway. The woman takes the lad to an outbuilding where she lives and tells him to stay there: she will return with food and drink, but he must remain hidden: The revelers outside aren\u2019t always welcoming to strangers.<\/p>\n

He does as she says, looking out a top window onto the festivities. The young woman returns with food and drink and offers to share her bed and body with the boy, a virgin uninterested in fornicating with a hunchback. He leaves her and wanders around the village, creeping into houses to look around in the dark. Everyone seems asleep, passed out drunk. In one of the houses, he follows a woman to her bedroom and enters the room.<\/p>\n

Once the woman begins screaming, the boy runs from the small town with its villagers in pursuit. After a few hours of chase into the dawn, he collapses, eventually waking midday to find himself in a field, watched by an old woman who at first thinks he\u2019s just sleeping off a drinking jag and leads him to a well where he can clean himself and freshen up. Once she recognizes the kerchief the boy uses to wipe blood from his wounds as belonging to the lady of the house he escaped from, she and the boy get into an altercation. He throws the woman into the well, headfirst and continues his journey. Hours later, he meets a man on a wagon, who tells the boy to join him, that he\u2019s on his way to deliver a message where he and the boy will be fed.<\/p>\n

At the house\u2014a mansion\u2014the man (also nameless) introduces the boy as his \u201chonorable aide,\u201d and feasting commences, with a large party already going on. During the party, the boy meets a girl, who encourages him to follow her downstairs\u2014a long decent down to a series of dimly lit cages where prisoners and feral animals are kept. The girl wants to play a prank on a friend of hers, which goes badly for both girls, and the boy runs back upstairs, certain that the girl\u2019s father will have him beaten and imprisoned.<\/p>\n

Back upstairs, the boy rejoins the messenger. The messenger has no idea what his message is about or who is recipient is supposed to be. He knows only that he has been set on this single task for decades. Once he feels that the person whose house he came to is no longer of use to him, he encourages the boy to help him burn down the house, locking its occupants inside.<\/p>\n

And so the two go, man and boy, from one stop to another, receiving information about where to go next\u2014either to finally deliver the message, let somebody know the message is on its way, or be told where to go next, then destroying what they\u2019ve left behind. Although the dank air of mystery, unease, and decadence pervades their travels and stops, imbuing the travel with Sadean cruelty and murder, Poe\u2019s influence on Ch\u00e2teaureynaud is greater here than Kafka, both writers that Ch\u00e2teaureynaud has been likened to. Kafka was more interested in the gnostic maze of bureaucracy and social etiquette than in gratuitous, whimsical nastiness. And The Messengers<\/em> has something to it of lore or forgotten ghost stories, a living hell of a cycle passed down from one generation to another.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Xenotext, Books 1<\/a> & 2<\/a><\/strong>
\nChristian B\u00f6k
\nCoach House Press<\/p>\n

Christian B\u00f6k is a writer and artist who enjoys working within rigid constraints, strict rules for producing texts. Artistic texts, especially poetry, have long worked within constraints. Shakespearean sonnets, for instance, consist of 14-lines divided into three four-line stanzas and a final two-line stanza, following a particular rhyme scheme (ABAB, say), written in iambic pentameter. These constraints influence such things as word choice, nuance, connotation, and so forth. It is a sign of craftsmanship mastery to construct such a poem, especially when it hides rather than calls attention to its construction. A reader\u2019s attention is held by the semantic content of the poem, not its mechanism.<\/p>\n

For an earlier work, Euonia<\/em> (2001), B\u00f6k wrote a book with five chapters\u2014A, E, I, O, and U\u2014using words in each chapter that have only that vowel in them. For example, \u201clive\u201d wouldn\u2019t qualify for Chapter I but \u201cliving\u201d would. He sought to exhaust the extant vocabulary satisfying this condition, and managed to deploy 98% of it, including the goal to minimize word repetition (hard to avoid with articles and conjunctions). B\u00f6k furthermore imposed conditions that each chapter must describe a culinary banquet, debauch, pastoral tableau, and nautical voyage. And, finally, Euonia<\/em>\u2019s sentences used \u201caccented internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism.\u201d<\/p>\n

This effort took seven years to complete and is about 100 pages long.<\/p>\n

With The Xenotext, Book 2<\/em>, B\u00f6k now ends a 25-year project with even stricter constraints: embedding a poem in the genes of a living bacterium that, when genetically transcribed, produces a corresponding poem, both of which can be genetically replicated without error, ad infinitum: one poem each for Orpheus and Eurydice that tells and re-enacts their tale of eternal love, mourning, and death.<\/p>\n

The Xenotext<\/em> consists of a single sonnet (called \u2018Orpheus\u2019), which, when translated into a gene and then integrated into a cell, causes the cell to \u2018read\u2019 this poem, interpreting it as an instruction for building a viable, benign protein\u2014one whose sequence of amino acids encodes yet another sonnet (called \u2018Eurydice\u2019). The cell becomes not only an archive for storing a poem, but also a machine for writing a poem. The \u2026 intended symbiote is D. radiodurans (a germ able to survive, unchanged, in even the deadliest environment). A poem stored in the genome of such a resilient bacterium might outlive every civilization, persisting on the planet until the very last dawn, when our star finally explodes.<\/p>\n

The genetic segment comprising the poem \u201cOrpheus\u201d assigns \u201ca codon of DNA to each letter of the text\u2014for example: GTG encodes the letter A; ACC encodes the letter N; CGT encodes the letter Y, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

The germ transcribes codons of DNA into correlative nucleotides for a strand of RNA, whereupon the cellular ribosome \u2018reads\u2019 this RNA, creating a protein segment, in which each of the amino acids corresponds to a letter in the poem \u2018Eurydice\u2019\u2014for example: valine (V) encodes the letter T; threonine (T) encodes the letter H; arginine (R) encodes the letter E, etc. The protein comes tagged with an incarnadine fluorophore, called mCherry, which makes the germ fluoresce. As the cell converts the words of \u2018Orpheus\u2019 into the words of \u2018Eurydice,\u2019 the cell emits a \u2018rosy glow,\u2019 the faery in the poem itself.<\/p>\n

Of the constraints used, adenine, for instance, the chemical structure for which is represented as C5H5N5, has as the building blocks of the poem representing it five words starting with C, five with H, and five with N:<\/p>\n

nurturant
\ncreatures, honeybees
\nnursemaid
\ncollected
\nchemicals,
\ncocooning nectarous honeydews\u2014heartsome
\nnarcotics,
\ncunningly harvested,
\nnumbingly hypnoidal<\/p>\n

Each poetic type represented in the books\u2019 various sections must conform to strict constraints in their construction. For instance, \u201cThe Nocturne of Orpheus\u201d \u201cis a love poem\u2014an alexandrine sonnet in blank verse. Each line contains thirty-three letters, and together the lines form a double acrostic of the dedication; moreover, the text is a perfect anagram of the sonnet \u2018When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be\u2019 by John Keats…\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Book 1 looks back in time, Book 2 forward. Book 2 proposes a further, perhaps more practical potential for encoding information in bacteria: as a mode for storing and preserving cultural history, the history of a civilization, to outlast its own life. This may be of interest to a civilization, such as ours, which seems dedicated to self-annihilation.<\/p>\n

So, what about the chosen bacterium, D. radiodurans<\/em>? In Book 2\u2019s section, \u201cThe Extremophile,\u201d we learn that D. radiodurans<\/em> can withstand temperatures as hot as 423 K and as low a near absolute zero. \u201cIt derives no energy from the Sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete.\u201d Also: \u201cIt breathes methane. It can withstand temperatures \u2026 hot enough to melt phosphorous.\u201d We are told \u201cIt devours plutonium\u201d and that it can be found in a lake with an acidity comparable to lye. It would remain unfazed by the fall of atomic bombs. Bring on your worst, B\u00f6k\u2019s love poems will endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I arrogantly recommend… is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.” Links are provided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[762],"tags":[466,461],"class_list":["post-73964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature-reviews","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}