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Non-Fiction Book of the Month: Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson

11.01.2017 by Ollie //

Susan Sontag

A significant amount of recent feminist scholarship in fields such as literature, history, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies, has focused on affect and emotion, and Nelson explains that Tough Enough “marks a border territory of affect studies.” At a time when we are thinking in new and exciting ways about not just the existence but about the value of affect and emotion in texts, writers, and readers, Nelson’s book marks an important intervention in the field. In a culture that often derides women, both private and public, for expressing and engaging seriously with feelings, the six women discussed in Tough Enough have, to varying degrees, been accused of the opposite, their work being too austere, too cold, too unfeeling. In reading several limit cases of affect among women writers, intellectuals, and artists, Tough Enough reveals the ways in which refusals of sentimentality, by those most likely to be accused of it, constitute a deliberate and powerful ethical stance.

Facing Facts, Facing Reality: On Deborah Nelson’s “Tough Enough” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Our Non-Fiction Book of the Month for November is Tough Enough, Deborah Nelson's extraordinary investigation into the lives of six women whose work helped to transform 20th century writing, art, politics, and philosophy; Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. 

Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson

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From Chicago University Press:
This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches.
Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.

Categories // News Tags // Non-Fiction Book of the Month

Non-Fiction Book of the Month: Black and British by David Olusoga

10.01.2017 by Ollie //

David Olusoga

“We were the biggest empire the world had ever seen. The idea that you can have a domestic history apart from it doesn’t make sense. Take the industrial revolution: the stories about spinning jennys and water frames are all part of our heritage. But where does the cotton being spun in those machines come from? At school, we went to mills and factories and nobody at any point in my education pointed out that the cotton processed in those mills was made by enslaved black Americans. When we talk about the history of the industrial revolution, the missing people in that revolution are the 1.8 million enslaved people who made that cotton. It was our biggest export and almost all of it came from the American deep south.”

David Olusoga: ‘There’s a dark side to British history, and we saw a flash of it this summer’ (Guardian)

In support of Black History Month, our Non-Fiction Book of the Month throughout October will be David Olusoga's award-winning Black and British: A Forgotten History. 

Black and British by David Olusoga

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Black and British: A Forgotten History

From Pan Macmillan:
In Black and British, award-winning historian and broadcaster David Olusoga offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare's Othello.
It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain's global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of the First World War. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.
Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries. Black and British is a vital re-examination of a shared history, published to accompany the landmark BBC Two series.

Categories // News Tags // History, Non-Fiction Book of the Month, Race

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