Book Reviews

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvelously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have traveled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.

Readers of Sigrid Nunez’s long-form fiction will be familiar with her concerns about storytelling: the gaps between what happened, what is remembered and what can be understood only through fictionalizing. Her new collection of 13 stories, written across several decades, returns to questions of memory and the unreliability of narrative. The stories tend to have mundane settings: an insomniac awake late at night; a traveler stranded by a flight delay. Nunez is less interested in dramatic incidents than in the way a passing encounter can alter one’s understanding of life. Her narrators frequently find themselves re-evaluating past certainties or realizing that events they thought they’d understood resist neat explanations.

For Spectator readers not familiar with the cultural figure known as MrBeast, his real name is Jimmy Donaldson and he is best known for taking over YouTube and making himself a multi-millionaire in the process. And now his work can be discovered in a literary, rather than streaming, sphere. It has been announced that MrBeast will be collaborating with the bestselling thriller writer James Patterson to publish a novel entitled The Most Dangerous Games in September. It does not, in truth, sound like the stuff of high literature, or even particularly distinguished page-turning trash. The plot synopsis suggests that “In a world on the brink of collapse, one hundred players face off in a ruthless, high‑stakes competition with everything on the line. The reward?

"Read Hillbilly Elegy," a friend messaged me a decade ago. "The author really gets it." So I did, and indeed he did. The young and then obscure J.D. Vance showed, through his family travails in Appalachia, how both Republicans and Democrats had in their different ways screwed blue collar, just-about-working-class families like his. The book went platinum and launched his public career. Three things saved the young Vance from the fate that awaited people like him: a fiercely defensive and religious grandmother ("Mamaw"), enlisting in the Marines, and evangelical Christianity. He fell away from this last, however, as he discovered that his fundamentalist faith may have had community love in spades but was very short on good answers to big questions.

In the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster Dulles might seem welcome for hawks and doves alike. Indeed, Dulles’s tenure as secretary of state during the first six years of the Eisenhower administration could be viewed – even by the harshest left-wing critic of American imperialism – as a useful and reassuring point of reference, despite its narrow anti-communist dogma and too cavalier approach to the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. After all, the Eisenhower administration extricated the United States from President Truman’s stalemated Korean War and started no major new wars before the end of Eisenhower’s second term in January 1961.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on social media in the past couple of years, you will probably be familiar with the tradwife phenomenon that has grown up as a reaction against the harder-edged and more strident girlboss feminism that itself threatened to become the dominant form of discourse towards the end of the last decade. Tradwifery, a form of embrace of traditional domestic roles that concentrates on the woman as homemaker, mother and carer while allowing her husband (always a husband, never a "partner”) to fulfill masculine aspects of patriarch and hunter-gatherer, has been decried by some as a right-wing coded backwards step into submissiveness. Others have described it as a welcome return to common sense and social cohesion.