To Read & To Write

Charles King's  Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century  acts as a complex case study of the discipline of Anthropology, beginning with Franz Boas - a German man of Jewish descent - who found both success and failure in the United States during the beginning of the 20th century. King's text is fundamental to a critical understanding of how disciplines might be formed and how they change over time.  Gods  digs deep into questions concerning scientific methodology and determinism. Readers will find shocking evidence of how racism has been institutionalized and how scholars, not only Boaz, but also Margaret Mead and Zora Neal Hurston, fought to change the dominant ideologies of a hierarchical concept of race, sex and gender that ruled academia at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Through their application of rigorous empiricism (for example, the study and measurement of skulls) and t...

For readers of the late Susan  Sontag , Benjamin Moser's  Sontag: Her Life and Work , will help retrieve her well-known critical essays and novels, such as  Illness As A Metaphor  and  Notes On Camp , and place them in the light of her deeply fraught childhood and her struggles with identity. Two concerns, amidst a vast number of them, include the alcoholism of her mother and  Sontag 's acceptance of her homosexuality in a still largely conservative America. Moreover, Moser traces  Sontag 's life (spanning 1933 - 2004) as well as her ancestry by using historical documentation, most notably  Sontag 's actual diary entries, in which a paradoxical politics concerning the idea of authenticity reveals itself, as well as another major theme recurrent in Sontag's work: the division between mind and body. What might make this book stand out for many readers is quite surprising: Mosers' grasp on the multi-faceted layers of Jewish culture and history i...