• print • Feb/Mar 2010

    The Jazz Swinger

    Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson found inspiration among Harlem’s culturati • Katherine Dunn

    Few now remember boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, except perhaps as Jake LaMotta’s shadowy nemesis in Raging Bull. But through the middle of the twentieth century, Robinson was an American icon of dangerous power expressed with deft artistry and a gentleman’s demeanor outside the ring as well as in it. Millions of people hung on the broadcasts of his bouts. When he fought in Europe, he was hailed as royalty. In 1951, his smiling face filled the cover of Time magazine. Women swooned before him. Men dressed like him. Cassius Clay studied him. In his long, bright day, Sugar Ray was a star.

    In Sweet

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    The Black Power Puzzle

    Reexamining the legacy of the post–civil rights era • Clay Risen

    It’s one of the most famous photos from 1968, a year full of them: two African-American athletes on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics, their heads bowed, their fists gloved and raised in the Black Power salute. The International Olympic Committee called it “a deliberate and violent breach” of the games’ spirit, but the athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, remained unflappable. They did it out of respect, they said, for the memory of Malcolm X—and of Martin Luther King Jr.

    Really? King and Malcolm are supposed to represent the polar opposites of black activism. What did King have

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Whiteness Falls

    The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter • Jabari Asim

    During the 2009 holiday shopping rush, a popular computer maker encountered an embarrassing problem—its vaunted facial-recognition program failed to register black faces. Much of the ensuing media discussion noted that such software was still in its infancy. It makes sense that computers would be confused about race. After all, their creators are often equally clueless.

    Much American racial ignorance probably stems from our stubborn insistence on “recognizing” race in the first place. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” Nell Irvin Painter reminds us in her impressive new book, The History of White

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Pooling Resources

    Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon • Martha Bayne

    A noun followed by a colon and a claim to greatness—whether Coal: A Human History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, it’s a formula with proven publishing legs. As these smartly packaged microhistories train their writers’ full powers of research and analysis on undervalued or overlooked topics, they can, in skilled hands, elevate humble subjects to glorious heights—and argue convincingly for their importance on the world stage. However, as deployed in Steven Solomon’s exhaustive new Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, the strategy of the close

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    A Sorry Rendition

    The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror by John Kiriakou with Michael Ruby • Jeff Stein

    His name may not ring a bell, but John Kiriakou was the CIA guy who surfaced on television during the furor over waterboarding to declare that, sure, it was torture, but it worked like magic on Al Qaeda kingpin Abu Zubaydah. According to Kiriakou, a long-time veteran of the agency’s intelligence-analysis and operations directorates, Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou told ABC-TV’s Brian Ross in an exclusive interview on December 10, 2007. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Uneasy Rider

    The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover • Graeme Wood

    If ever you have reason to step out of an airport in Peru, Kenya, or another of the places in Ted Conover’s latest book of reportage, you will preserve your life by following one simple procedure. Ignore the scrum of eager cab drivers at the door and instead proceed to the edge of the parking lot. Find the driver with the fewest teeth, the most gray hairs, and the thickest glasses. He’s your man: Anyone who has survived to AARP age with these handicaps, on third-world roads, must have an abundance of caution, or perhaps just a jalopy that can’t reach the hundred-mile-per-hour standard of Peruvian

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Making Our Mark

    Two scholars scrutinize Twain’s last years as an American icon • Gary Indiana

    Laura Trombley’s Mark Twain’s Other Woman and Michael Shelden’s Mark Twain: Man in White are remarkably absent any close study of the literary works of Mark Twain, concerned as they are with the last decade or so in the life of a writer whose important books had been written very previously. Twain’s major project between 1900 and 1910 was the burnishing of his public image; as his every sneeze, utterance, and physical movement from one location to another was clocked for posterity by the world press, typically in banner headlines, the historically ill informed could easily conclude that the

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Change Artist

    On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsić • Paul Grimstad

    Fresh from having resigned his pulpit in the Second Unitarian Church, and after briefly considering becoming a botanist, Ralph Waldo Emerson decided to try his hand at philosophy. His 1836 pamphlet, Nature, contains a theory of history, an ethics, a philosophy of language, and an aesthetics. The system, if we can call it that, is a sort of Orphic pantheism. Among its teachings are that nature is a hieroglyph of our minds, that there exists an “occult relation between man and the vegetable,” and that we “expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” The book hits its psychedelic zenith

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    Collage Bound

    Harry Smith’s fragmented art eludes his earnest interpreters • Alexander Provan

    When the filmmaker, painter, ethnographer, occultist, and occasional vagrant Harry Smith died in New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1991, he left behind 166 boxes of belongings. They contained such treasures as Chinese papier-mâché masks, an illustrated manuscript on string figures (which he noted were “produced by all primitive societies” and “the only universal thing other than singing”), and countless sets of collectible cards, among them Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards, the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck, and Stardust Casino Playing Cards. The work of the collector is never done, and Smith

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America

    When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America by David E. Nye • Ian Volner

    Smack in the middle of Jonathan Mahler’s best-selling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning there unfolds an unforgettable account of the 1977 New York City blackout. Personal narratives, drawn from interviews and documentary sources, of the politicians, technicians, looters, and police who experienced the blackout are all stitched together in Mahler’s accelerated and visceral montage. After this, any historian attempting to convey the same events must have a fair amount of chutzpah, but sadly, David Nye’s social history of blackouts, When the Lights Went Out, lacks the cinematic flair of

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual

    From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual by David Levi Strauss • Brian Sholis

    The title of critic David Levi Strauss’s new book, paired with his reputation for engaging political subjects, suggests From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual might be a fruitful addition to the recent spate of books that link craftsmanship to broader questions about economic worth. The best known of these are Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2008) and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), both of which draw on a tradition of moral criticism, inaugurated by John Ruskin and William Morris, that protests capitalism’s tendency to undervalue skilled labor. Being aesthetes, Sennett

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2010

    This Train Is Bound for Glory

    This Train Is Bound for Glory by Justine Kurland, introduction by William T. Vollmann • David O’Neill

    A born rambler, Justine Kurland has been traveling across America with a camera for the past decade. In 2004, when her son, Casper, was born, she took him along for the ride. Their camping van soon became crammed with toy trains; Casper’s enthusiasm for locomotives was infectious, and Kurland’s work began to explore real railways, as well as the train hoppers and hobos she met along the way. Like any parent, she also frequently aimed her camera at her child, as he toddled through the blighted and bountiful landscape of America’s backwoods and slept in a cozy bed built into the van. In the

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