Aiding Violence

By Peter Uvin (Kumarian Press, 1998)

The various governmental and nongovernmental organizations that practice international development work—USAID, the World Bank, the IMF, sundry UN organs—are often accused of seemingly contradictory things. One critic paints these organizations as deeply cynical, another as imperialist. Still another decries them as hopelessly naïve. But one criticism all sides repeat is that the organizations never seem to ask the hard questions about whether the work they’re doing is, well, working. Are they doing good? Are they doing harm?

This criticism has some validity to it. The debates within the field happen far from the public eye, and when something goes wrong, you don’t often hear anyone say they’re sorry in public. But now and again, you get a peek, a blazing exception. The best example of this I can think of is Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda—a bold, intensely critical, and moving book that still leaves me shaken years after having read it, which is really saying something for a book aimed at specialists in economic development and international affairs.

The popular conception of the Rwandan genocide is that it rose out of nothing: One minute, Rwanda was a relatively peaceful place; the next, it was a bloodbath. That is, of course, untrue, as dozens of books written about it since then can attest (see, in particular, When Victims Become Killers, by Mahmood Mamdani). But there’s a reason that the popular conception persists, and some of it may have to do with the fact that, right up until the machetes came out, Rwanda was considered to be, as Uvin puts it, “a model of development in Africa.”

Uvin is a development specialist himself, who began working in Rwanda in 1991, three years before the genocide began. This fact is extremely important to the criticisms he makes in Aiding Violence, because they’re not condemnations; they’re excoriating self-inquiries of a variety that few people have the guts to muster ever, especially in print. As Uvin writes, while unrest roiled in Rwanda and at its borders and the pieces were falling into place for massacre,

almost none of the foreign experts living and working in Rwanda expected the genocide to occur or did anything to stop it from happening. Up to the last minute, thousands of technical assistants and foreign experts were building roads, extending credit, training farmers, protecting the environment, reorganizing ministries, advising finance officers, and delivering food aid, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—the lion’s share of all government expenditures. For most of these people, up to the end, Rwanda was a well-developing country—facing serious development problems, but dealing with them much more effectively than were other countries.

This contradiction poses profound challenges for anyone who has ever worked with the development enterprise in Rwanda or in Africa in general; for me, it led to a long reflection process, of which this book is the result. What does development mean if a country that is seemingly succeeding so well at it can descend so rapidly into such tragedy? Why did those of us who worked there have no idea that this was coming?

Uvin—rightly, of course—lays the direct blame for the killing on those who perpetrated it. But he never lets himself or his colleagues off the hook:

The process of development and the international aid given to promote it interacted with the forces of exclusion, inequality, pauperization, racism, and oppression that laid the groundwork for the 1994 genocide. In countries such as Rwanda, where development aid provides such a large share of the financial and moral resources of government and civil society, development aid cannot help but play a crucial role in shaping the processes that lead to violence.

And that’s just the introduction. But the book isn’t simply critical; unlike development work’s more blunt detractors, Uvin isn’t trying to tear the organizations down. He’s trying to change the way they operate. By the time you’ve worked through his book—a nuanced and precise account of the way that the international development community related to Rwandan government and society before 1994—if you didn’t agree before, you’ll be nodding in complete agreement at his statement that

all development aid constitutes a form of political intervention … at all levels, from the central government to the local community. Ethnic and political amnesia does not make development aid and the processes it sets in motion apolitical; it just renders these processes invisible.

Uvin’s prescriptions (which he fleshed out in a second book, Human Rights and Development, in 2004) are then an example of policy writing at its best: In his plea “in favor of defining all development, and all development aid, in more holistic and political terms, at both the intellectual and the operational level” and the analysis around it, he sprints far beyond the way the debate is usually framed in popular discourse to a series of conclusions that are as smart as they are practical. And the good news is that it mattered. Uvin—now a dean and professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts—wrote a book that made waves throughout the world of international development and changed the way that aid organizations did their work.

Aiding Violence is thus a great book for nonspecialists who are interested in, and skeptical of, the efficacy of international development and genocide prevention efforts. Uvin’s criticisms are far more devastating than most of what you hear in the mainstream media, but they also offer a way out. Genocide is still with us, still a problem from hell, but Uvin takes his place beside many others who are not only telling us we should do more to stop it, but showing us how.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

NHR party/Palin poetry/NHR author signed to Pantheon

First things first: the issue #3 launch party will be at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, from 6pm to 8pm. Please come! Second, we are thrilled that after we wrote about essayist Lee Sandlin, an undiscovered literary treasure, an agent on our email list contacted him, they got together, and now he has a two-book deal with Pantheon. Congratulations! (And glad we could help.)

Finally, a couple weeks back, we put out the call for poems about Sarah Palin. We just had a hunch that out there, somewhere, somebody had decided that Sarah Palin merited verse. A lot of great poems came in, but the sure winner, for dedication if not for quality, has to be the blogger at wittyditty.wordpress.com, who in the past few weeks has turned her (why are we so sure it's a “her”? we could be wrong) blog over to the versified crucifixion of Alaska's leading flutist/politician.

From Schlub to Stud

By Max Gross (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008)

Quick prefatory remark: a lot of people love Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a book about his inability to write the book he really wants to write, a critical study of D. H. Lawrence. Now, I love OOSR too, but unlike most of its fans, I don’t pretend it’s a brilliant meta-study about writer’s block, the meaning of biography, or obsessive fandom. Rather, I just think that it’s fun to meander with Geoff Dyer because, well, he’s good company. His trivial, time-wasting thoughts aren’t deep: they are just enjoyable to read.

Chuck Klosterman is fun in the same way; a lot of Klosterman is brilliant and hilarious, but even low-grade Klosto is still fun to hang with. So, too, with the best bloggers, whom we enjoy even when they are less than profound.

Add another one to the list: Max Gross, author of From Schlub to Stud, a new memoir of being pudgy, Jew-froed, Seth Rogen–looking, and hapless. Here’s the blog copy, than which I can do no better:

For years after college, Max Gross was a schlubby ne'er-do-well sporting an unwieldy Jewfro. He fought off double-chins and man-boobs. His style of dress was reminiscent of a stoned urban slacker. Young Max Gross truly was hapless in a big city. He was seemingly without luck or hope. He had bedbugs, a bad break-up, and an audit by the IRS that threatened to break his soul.

But he had heart (as well as two nagging parents). When Gross saw the smash comedy Knocked Up, he realized his day might have arrived. All these years of being a world-class schlub would finally pay off. Thinking quickly, Gross wrote an article about the phenomenon and soon found true love.

Not intrigued? Fine. But for those of us without enough hilarity in our lives, this is a book worth owning. And El Schlub-O has a blog worth visiting. And even his publishing house is hilarious — reading the catalogue of Skyhorse Publishing is funnier than all but the best Shouts & Murmurs and Onion articles. One would say that Gross deserves a better, less ridiculous publisher — except the point of his book is that a loser like him really doesn’t. They deserve each other!

Mark Oppenheimer has this article in the latest New York Times Magazine.

Burning the Sea

By Sarah Pemberton Strong (Alyson Books, 2002)

When I was a kid, my family used to go to the Caribbean for vacation in the summer. Once, on a beach in Barbados, I watched a conch fisherman in the rough surf right off shore, just a man with a set of fins, a long metal pole, and a knife, diving over and over again to the bottom about twelve feet below him. When he came to shore he had a shell in his hand that I coveted at once. I don't remember how the exchange began, but I must have asked him for it, because I remember what happened next in great detail.

"You want this?" he said. I told him I did. He looked at my parents nearby and his expression changed, to something not altogether friendly. Without a word, he slid his knife into the shell and made a long incision. The shell began to bleed, much more than I thought it was going to. Then the man took the shell in one hand and the metal pole in the other, and began to beat the shell, hard, until the shell spat pieces of dead conch onto the sand. When the man was done, the shell was speckled with gore; he bent down, washed the shell in the water surging around his feet, and handed it to me.

"There," he said. "There’s your shell."

Later I learned a little bit more about the Caribbean and its history; the ways that crime, revolution, the legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the fact that it is a paradise occasionally visited by savage weather have given the region a distinct eeriness — a sense of beauty and threat — that I only caught glimpses of as a tourist. When I read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea a decade ago, it was a revelation, a book that had seemingly mined that eeriness deeply, and I wondered if I would ever come across its equal again.

Before I say what I am about to say, please know I am fully aware of Wide Sargasso Sea’s canonical status in both Caribbean and feminist literature, and that I dislike hyperbole when describing books. Now listen: Sarah Pemberton Strong's Burning the Sea is the heir and equal — and possibly superior to — Wide Sargasso Sea. It is a book of such grace and terror that I despair of finding another book like it for a long time.

Burning the Sea is about Michelle, an American, and Tollomi, a Cruzan, who have both lost touch with their families and the places they're from. Both also have unusual relationships with their pasts: Michelle has trouble remembering much of hers at all, while Tollomi remembers so much that he's drowning in it. They meet by chance in the Dominican Republic, when Tollomi, a charming polyglot, bails Michelle out when she is detained at the airport; thrown together, they fall quickly into an intense friendship as Michelle searches for a plot of DR land bequeathed to her by her grandfather while Tollomi begins an affair with a young Dominican man. The people they meet along the way draw them into Dominican opposition politics, as they may or may not become connected to a rash of fires being started in the luxury hotels along the shore. Meanwhile, there are hints that Michelle's past involves something she may not want to remember.

Strong brings in a lot of ideas at once, and for much of Burning the Sea all is exquisite tension, as the characters follow their desires and Strong elaborates upon and begins to connect her multiple themes. The first three quarters of the book have a dreamy, luxuriant menace to them; somehow, somewhere, on the next page, something is going to go terribly wrong. Then, in the final quarter, Burning the Sea becomes almost unbelievably good, though telling you how would ruin the book enough that I won't say anything more about what happens. It doesn't become merely a political screed, or soap opera, or melodrama, or horror story, as in lesser hands it very well might have. Instead, it becomes all these things at once, and also something transcendent: a rumination on identity, history, and memory; the violence shot through it all; and how to come to terms with them, nationally, personally, and politically.

The real reason I can't get Burning the Sea out of my head over a year after reading it, however, is the writing. With sentences sharp, elliptical, gorgeous, and sinister, Strong finds the same vein that Rhys tapped into in Wide Sargasso Sea and tears it wide open. Burning the Sea's ideas set the brain on fire, but Strong's writing stops the heart.

Given how fickle the book world can be, that a book this good has gone unrecognized is perhaps understandable; that it is currently out of print, as Burning the Sea seems to be, is baffling. This should be fixed — now — so that this book has a chance to sit alongside the company it deserves.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Review Hiatus Continues; Dispatches in America

As the above title suggests, the New Haven Review's hiatus continues. In the meantime, we commend to your attention John Stoehr's review of Dispatches in America, the first issue released by Dispatches, a quarterly journal and website concern with a fascinating mission and editorial stance. May we hear much more about Dispatches as it progresses. Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Review Hiatus; Summer Book Group This Wednesday

The New Haven Review's August hiatus from reviews begins this week as we line up website reviews for the fall and edit Issue 3 of the print edition, which will appear in November. (Yes, we hope to throw another party. We can't help ourselves.) We would also like to remind New Haven-area readers that our final summer book group meeting at Labyrinth Books is this Wednesday at 6 p.m.; New Haven Review contributor Steven Stoll will discuss David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. For those unfamiliar with the term, neoliberalism is the catchall phrase for the dominant economic ideology of our time — liberalized capitalism — and the various political and social policies associated with it that have changed the world in profound ways. As the ideology is championed, reviled, elided, and misunderstood in nearly equal measure, a discussion of neoliberalism should be about as lively as discussions get. As always, Labyrinth provides the wine and cheese. See you there!

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Summer Book Group July 23: Lush Life

Another reminder: The New Haven Review's Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books continues tomorrow, July 23, with Mark Oppenheimer leading a discussion of Richard Price's Lush Life, in which Price turns his unflinching eye on the new New York. As before, we bring the discussion; Labyrinth provides the wine and cheese. Hope to see you tomorrow.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

The Great Kisser

By David Evanier (Rager Media, 2007)

We all do it, right? Before we read a book, we look at the blurbs, look at the publishing house, look at the bio, look at the acknowledgments, put it all together, and try to figure out if this writer is somebody. (Isn’t it nice to pigeon-hole a writer before you’ve read one word of her work?) But then sometimes you do all that stuff and at the end of it still have no idea what to think. Such was the case after I’d done my superficial canvass of The Great Kisser, by David Evanier, published by the little known — okay, unknown — Rager Media, of Akron, Ohio. Never heard of the guy, for one thing. Couldn’t quite believe that, as his bio claimed, he’d once been fiction editor of The Paris Review. And while one blurb was from Sven Birkerts, and another from Stephen Dixon, the third was from Norman Podhoretz.

Stumped.

So I read the book.

It is splendid. A story cycle that loses some power as it goes along — its constituent parts get a bit repetitive — it is the travelogue through life of one Michael Goldberg, a New York kid, now in his upper years, a writer who never quite made it, spent some time in Hollywood, didn’t quite make it there either, unlucky in love, obsessed with Sinatra and the other crooners. Misplaced in time, probably should have been born fifty years earlier. The courtship rituals of an earlier era would have helped him with the ladies, and the music was more to his liking. The opening novella, “The Tapes,” about Goldberg’s psychiatrist’s leaving him tapes of dozens of hours of sessions with patients, is funny, touching, touched, and memorable. “Scraps,” about the high school sweetheart who got away, is so wonderfully dead-on earnest you almost have to look away.

If you don’t quite get it yet, think Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton, mixed with some of the poignant scenes from Annie Hall and some of the bleak sex one finds in Leonard Michaels. In fact, this book’s closest kin is Michaels’s gets-in-your-bones good novella Sylvia. Same NYC without the air-conditioning, love that can’t last, that sort of thing. New Yorkish and Jewish and intellectual, but lacking confidence and mostly lacking money — that’s Michael Goldberg. Also, he has a weird affinity for mobsters.

Good books are published in Akron, it seems.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

New Haven Review Summer Vacation

In deference to Independence Day, the New Haven Review has taken this Monday off. It will also take off the Mondays in August, as we know that nearly everyone — well, everyone in publishing, anyway — goes on vacation; and even if they don't, nobody wants to be inside, hunched over a computer, when they could be outside, on the beach, drinking a gin-and-tonic from what is ostensibly a water bottle while three children nearby bury their father up to his neck in the sand. But we will be back next week with more reviews and will resume again, full throttle, in September. Meanwhile, Issue 3 of the New Haven Review, due out in the fall, is shaping up to be a doozy. We have an essay from Jim Knipfel, a piece from Willard Spiegelman (editor of the Southwest Review), an excerpt from Jess Row's new novel, an interview with David Orr, and numerous other essays, poetry, and fiction from people you may not have heard of yet, but will soon. Stay tuned.

Summer Book Group July 2: The Rest is Noise

Just a reminder: The New Haven Review's Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books continues this Wednesday, July 2, with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise. Quite possibly this discussion will include demonstration, as Tom is an excellent guitar player. Hope to see you there.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks, New York Times!

If you're here because you've followed the link from Rachel Donadio's generous mention of us (thanks!) in the New York Times blog Paper Cuts, welcome. Please have a look around. Our weekly reviews appear right here on this page; you can find the contents of the print editions here.

Despite our fondness for the Greater New Haven area, we really are interested in submissions from anywhere. So if you have an idea, for the print edition or the website, do write us. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for reading.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor for the New Haven Review.

Lee Sandlin

Usually, we use this Monday post to recommend an unfairly neglected book. Today we’d like to introduce you to an unfairly neglected writer.

I’m now at that biblical age (New Testament age, anyway) of thirty-three, which is about when many of us decide that we know the names of all the good writers we’ll need to know. Not that we’ve read all the great books, or ever will, but that coming across an entirely new name whose work, upon discovery, instantly seems essential is an increasingly rare phenomenon. The last time it happened was when I found Dave Hickey’s amazing collection of essays, Air Guitar. Or maybe it was when my friend Emily Moore introduced me to the poet David Wagoner. Well, it’s happened again. His name is Lee Sandlin.

For a class I am teaching in the fall, I assigned a terrific collection of journalism, edited by Ira Glass, called The New Kings of Nonfiction. It includes pieces by many of the greats—Susan Orlean, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler--and a couple pieces by people I hadn’t heard of. One such piece is Lee Sandlin's “Losing the War,” which originally appeared in the Chicago Reader. It is a classic essay, easily better than most of what appears in any magazine in the United States.

I won’t do much to summarize the essay, which thankfully is online, except to say that it’s a meditation about our historical memory of World War II: how war fever made it impossible for even great reporters to write accurately about the war then, and how historians have failed to find the language to write about it since. The essay does not read as if it’s written by more scholarly writers on war and memory, like the redoubtable Paul Fussell, whose books are brilliant and clear, but not, well, fun; Fussell is too much the literary critic (except when he’s not, as in the hilarious book Class, which is one of the few books that will actually make you laugh out loud). Lee Sandlin’s essay is accessible and blunt, personal and cerebral at the same time.

Sandlin has written other long, brilliant essays for the Chicago Reader. Most of them seem to be posted at his web page. It’s a cool page, filled with Desert Island lists of favorite books and songs, most of which I have never heard of. The level of obscurity is a bit maddening. This is a man who recommends that we listen to “Night Recordings from Bali” and tells us which is his favorite Icelandic saga (Njal’s, if you care). And don’t even get me started on his list of “Several Movies That Do Not, In Any Way, Shape or Form, Suck.”

I’d raise high the poseur lantern if not for the fact that a) he seems to have a sense of humor about all this (his list of recommended recordings is called “Old, Scratchy and Mostly Unintelligible Spirituals”) and b) Jesus, can the guy write. As a former alt-weekly editor, I am humbled that elsewhere in the country one of my peer publications was publishing stuff like this. As a writer, I envy the man’s gift. As a civic booster in the city of Publishing, I hope some editor will collect this man’s essays into a single volume, fast.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Change of Date for Next Summer Book Group

Attention interested parties: Tom Gogola's discussion of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, which was once to transpire on June 25, will now happen on July 2. Thanks again to Labyrinth Books for accommodating our fickle nature. Mark Oppenheimer's and Steven Stoll's discussions of Lush Life and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, respectively, will happen as previously scheduled. So again, for easy reading and marking of calendars:

New Haven Review Summer Book Group

July 2: Tom Gogola discusses The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.

July 23: Mark Oppenheimer discusses Lush Life by Richard Price.

August 13: Steven Stoll discusses A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

All events begin at 6 p.m., at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, CT. Hope to see you there.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks be to you, Atlantic Monthly!

We got a very nice shout-out in on The Atlantic’s blog from Ross Douthat, who has a piece in our new print issue. Ross, being a New Haven native, is of course a good soul.

Interfictions

Edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Small Beer Press, 2007)

It is commonplace to hear that if certain canonical writers were writing today — Herman Melville, say, or James Joyce — they would never be published. Leaving aside the difficulties that such writers faced in getting their books published in their own times, it does seem that major publishing houses are skittish about publishing books that are unlike other books, difficult to classify. Which is why I like to say that if Franz Kafka or Mikhail Bulgakov were writing today, they would be published by Small Beer Press.

Kelly Link, perhaps Small Beer’s most well-known author, is also one of its editors; Link has made her reputation on a series of acclaimed short stories that bend genres and twist tropes in a Borgesian way. Likewise, Small Beer’s roster of authors is rife with writers like John Crowley and Carol Emshwiller, whose works are about as good as books get and also elude description by genre. As literary critics don’t seem to analyze anything until they’ve slapped a hot pink label on it, a host of contending terms have emerged to describe these indescribable books. One is “interstitial,” which Small Beer’s Interfictions, a multiple-author short-story collection edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, seeks not only to define, but demonstrate. The result is a wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring.

Each story in Interfictions is a highwire act, writers writing without a net, and it thus isn’t a perfect collection; while no story falls outright, some are wobblier than others. But it’s telling that previous reviews of the volume have picked different stories to champion; there really is something here for everyone to be blown away by. (For the record, my favorites are Christopher Barzak’s “What We Know about the Lost Families of — House,” a haunted house story that also turns a keen eye on social conventions and the relation of people to their environment in rural Ohio, and Veronica Schanoes’s “Rats,” a story about punk rock told as an extremely self-aware fairy tale, back when fairy tales didn’t shirk from darkness and violence.)

For readers who are more interested in ambitious experiments than modest successes — and the occasional story that leaves them breathless — Interfictions is a wonderful introduction to Small Beer Press’s broader catalog and a group of writers who are widening the publishing landscape’s horizon for what’s possible in fiction.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

New Haven Review Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books

Thanks to the generosity of Labyrinth Books, the New Haven Review is proudly hosting a summer book group in its New Haven store at 290 York Street. Each of the editors — Mark Oppenheimer, Tom Gogola, and Brian Francis Slattery — and one author from Issue 2 of the Review, Steven Stoll, will lead a discussion of a recent book that they have loved. The books are available at Labyrinth, but of course, having read the book beforehand isn't mandatory to coming to the discussions or taking part in them.

First up is Brian Francis Slattery (i.e., me) on May 28, at 6 p.m., leading a discussion of A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya; an excellent overview of this slim, excoriating book appears on Labyrinth's website. I chose the book because, in recent memory, I haven't read a book that left me so shaken for so many different reasons, and it's one of a few books that I recommend to anyone who will bend an ear to listen. I hope that you, dear readers, will all come whether you have read the book or not. The discussion is likely to range across freedom of information issues, war correspondence, the swiftly changing face of Russia today, and whether the conflict in Chechnya and the government's massive cover-up of it will come back to haunt it. There is so much to talk about.

The New Haven Review Summer Book Group will continue on July 2 [formerly June 23 — ed.], also at 6 p.m., with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. On July 23, again at 6 p.m., Mark Oppenheimer will lead a discussion of Lush Life, the new novel by Richard Price. Finally, on August 13 at (surprise!) 6 p.m., Steven Stoll will discuss A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

In sum, and for easy reading and marking of calendars:

New Haven Review Summer Book Group

May 28: Brian Francis Slattery discusses A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya.

July 2: Tom Gogola discusses The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. [As above, amended from June 23--ed.]

July 23: Mark Oppenheimer discusses Lush Life by Richard Price.

August 13: Steven Stoll discusses A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

All events begin at 6 p.m., at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, CT. Hope to see you there.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks, New Haven Register...

...and Donna Doherty specifically for the generous profile of our publication that appeared in today's paper. The actual physical newspaper included this snazzy photo of editor Mark Oppenheimer, publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Mark's daughter Rebekah in dramatic lighting:

What the article says is all true too. So, Greater New Haveners: If you're interested in submitting, we're looking forward to hearing from you. If you're interested in subscribing, we thank you in advance. And if you're just here to read what we've published and posted so far, welcome. Take your time and have a look around. We hope you like what you see.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thank you, Stranger

If you're here because of the lovely post about the New Haven Review by Paul Constant at The Stranger, thanks for coming by. Mr. Constant is the books editor at Seattle's only newspaper, and we're delighted by his enthusiasm. We only hope that we can live up to his expectations. Retroactively, we also owe a great deal of thanks to John Stoehr, arts editor at the Charleston City Paper, first for an engaging and generous essay that mentioned us back in August 2007, when we released our first issue, and then for another mention in January in a piece about the future of newspapers. Many people visited our old website (now defunct, happily) due to him.

So thank you both, Mr. Constant and Mr. Stoehr, and welcome to all of you who came by on their advice. Look for our next review, coming in just a few days. Meanwhile, we're currently copyediting the print edition (Issue 2) and preparing to send it to the printer. It should be out in early May. Then we party. Then we do it all again.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks, National Book Critics Circle

We just got a nice shout-out from Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. If that's what brings you here, then welcome. It’s true: in addition to our print version, published twice annually, we’ll be posting reviews of unfairly neglected books on our website. A couple things: 1) By “neglected,” that doesn’t mean Walter Kirn dissed the book in the Times and nobody else reviewed it. It means the book was missed by the Times, The New York Review, Washington Post Book World, etc., etc. As in, nobody’s heard of the book. In our hopper we have one review of a book also reviewed in The Nation, but it’s a book of poetry, so our hearts went out to it. 2) If you want to get in touch with us, navigate around our site at left—you’ll find a mailing address and emails. 3) A small correction to the NBCC post: we’ll be running one review every Monday, not four. They got confused because there are four up right now (see below). But those were posted over a period of four weeks. In time, we may begin posting more than once a week. Meantime, we are looking to put up an RSS feed, so you can just get yourselves a little helping of neglected-book-review to start your week every Monday.

Thanks.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

By Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham University Press, 2007)

“I feel embarrassed,” writes the great literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman in this short, epigrammatic intellectual autobiography, “when, occasionally, younger colleagues, usually Jewish, address me as ‘my teacher.’ I realize this is fond and purely honorific, a secular version of ‘Rabbi.’ But it makes me aware of the fact that I have never thought of anyone in so personal a way as a role model.” This charming and defiantly smart book helps the reader to see that no one ever could have been Hartman's role model. His is so quirky an intelligence — and so roundly informed by his own, sad past as a teenaged refugee — that his only teacher in fact was Wordsworth. Separated from his family during the war, lacking for friends, Hartman wandered the countryside with the Prelude for a companion. All that he has done since, all the difficult, brilliant essays and books, began in that war-haunted boy’s solitude with his slim volume of poetry. You can read this book for explanations of critical theory — though they are still too abstruse to make much sense to the neophyte — or you can read this book for the droppings of academic gossip (Paul de Man, Auerbach, Harold Bloom). But ultimately this book is worth reading above all for its depiction of the kind of mind that has gone out of fashion: the omnivorous European reader, fluent in many languages, autodidactic, with enough whimsy left to suggest that at Yale May Day be celebrated as Midrash Day. (“The idea had a longevity of two years,” Hartman writes, with a touch of gallows humor.) If we never really know the man — wife and family and pastimes hardly feature in this book — we know the mind, and we do get lovely reminiscences of the child, “father of the man,” as Wordsworth himself told us.

Editor Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Thirteen and a Day, and lives in the Westville neighborhood.