From the late ’60s—when she published her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men—until her death in 2015, Collins published 32 best-selling novels, characterized by their ballsy female characters, explicit bedroom scenes, and trenchant portrayals of the entertainment industry and its abuses of power. To read a Collins novel, as roughly half a billion of us humans have, is to know that sex and power are inextricable. No one mined the dynamics of both as astutely in the late 20th century as she did. (As she told The New York Times in 2007, “I published my first novel in 1968, when no one was writing about sex except Philip Roth.”)
I first heard about Val Shively—a legendary figure among serious record collectors—from a friend of mine in Philadelphia named Aaron Levinson. He’s a Grammy-winning music producer, composer, DJ and rare vinyl collector who has been buying records from Shively for 40 years.
“He has a store called R&B Records in this sketchy neighborhood out past West Philly,” Levinson told me. “The building is listing like the Tower of Pisa because he’s got five million records in there. It’s likely the biggest record store in the world and collectors fly in from the U.K., Germany, Japan and wherever else, in order to buy from Val. But if they say something wrong, or he doesn’t like their attitude, he explodes in an unbelievable rage and throws them out of the store.”
The power of this book lies not just in Hernández’s unflinching journalistic examination of the racism and classism embedded in the U.S. and international health care systems, but also in the blend of this examination with her complicated grief over Dora. This is no book about an angelic aunt snatched too soon: Dora stopped speaking to Hernández when Hernández came out as queer, and when Dora died, Hernández wondered why she was drowning in grief for someone who was so horrid to her. Her search for the kissing bugs is partly an extirpation and examination of that grief; she eventually concludes that she is mourning not her relationship with Dora, but how that relationship might have healed had Dora lived.
The title refers to the fact that Fermi is one of the last physicists to make significant contributions to both experimental and theoretical physics. Fermi’s model of beta decay took a vague suggestion by Wolfgang Pauli and turned it into a rigorous mathematical theory, and his work in statistical physics is critical to modern condensed matter physics. He also ran an experimental group in Rome that was one of the first to demonstrate nuclear fission— work that’s (incorrectly) cited in his Nobel Prize— and later headed the team that built the first working nuclear reactor as part of the Manhattan Project. Even in the 1940’s, that sort of breadth was unusual; these days it’s unheard of.