But there is something else besides: an element of personal affection for a man they never met. “I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed,” wrote the novelist Nicholas Royle. One of this year’s Booker Prize shortlisted authors, Shehan Karunatilaka, says that when he was writing his novel, “Uncle Kurt … was a constant companion”.
Why do readers, even hard-nosed professional readers like this one, feel such attachment to both the writing and the man? Part of it may be because with Vonnegut, the soul of the man is so clearly displayed in the writing; and part of it may be because he is a writer that we tend to discover in adolescence, a gateway writer between teenage kicks and grown-up literature, like J.D. Salinger. As with Salinger, there is a disrupted innocence to Vonnegut’s writing, a sense of hope and despair arguing the toss.
Peter Freedman saw danger in the unfamiliar faces around him. It was August 1850, and he had come to Philadelphia looking for parents he had not seen in decades—not since he was separated from them as a child and sold south. The journey from Alabama had been long and arduous, but now that he was here, he was unsure if he should have come. Would he even recognize his parents if he saw them? It had been more than 40 years, after all.
He had good reason to be wary. Though he was now legally free, having purchased his own freedom after decades of bondage, he’d heard stories of kidnappers who were on the lookout for unsuspecting Black men like him. Some of these kidnappers even posed as abolitionists.
In a landscape of overtly wasteful "cooking videos" crafted for nothing other than gross-out humor and clout — not to mention cringeworthy recipe videos like Paula Patton's fried chicken — a certain wholesomeness came through, breaking through the sardonic, hard-edged shell of the internet's collective consciousness. Was it the natural, organic means in which this all came together? The rotisserie chicken guy's no-frills attitude and approach? The aligning synchronicity of the Philadelphia ethos? Inadvertent thirst? His glib, no-frills nonchalance? The RCG's insistence on always consuming a large bottle of seltzer with his requisite rotisserie chicken?
“G-Man” is a very sad story. Hoover’s highest ideal was the nonpartisan public servant, dedicated to burnishing the notion that the federal government was a force for good. And yet by the ’60s, Gage shows, Hoover’s reactionary instincts prevailed, and his actions helped to sow distrust of the federal government from both the right and the left. In the end, he was a “confused, sometimes lonely man.” Gage concludes, “We cannot know our own story without understanding his, in all its high aspiration and terrible cruelty, and in its many human contradictions.”
This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography.
Like many memoirs about personal demons, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom delves into the author's childhood to give a candid account of her various mortifications, of the flesh and otherwise.
The book makes its strongest case when advocating a revision of how to think about, and act towards, animals. Ms Gigliotti points out that humans are only one of millions of species on Earth. She suggests a retreat from anthropocentrism in favour of recognition that animals are individuals with complicated, powerful, creative lives of their own.