BOOKLOVES

Early in this sometimes difficult text, which owes much to fellow Collège de France professor Michel Foucault, Boucheron distinguishes analytical logic from fiction, noting that whereas the former gives the illusion that the world is logical, the latter “reveals to us the possibilities of thought.” The stories that critique or shore up political discourses, whether, […]

Weaving her impressive debut around the true story of the 1919 wreck of the Valbanera, “the poor man’s Titanic,” Ojito follows the epic journeys of two women, 100 years apart: journalist Mara Denis, a 55-year-old widow with a 19-year-old son, sent to cover a story in the Canary Islands, and her great-grandmother, Catalina Quintana Cabazas, […]

After Rue Holloway was caught kissing a girl, her mom enrolled her at Sacred Heart Academy, “in the middle of East Jesus Nowheresville,” where students are instilled with values of purity and deference. Rue, who’s labeled “too much,” has no desire to be a “good girl,” so she’s intrigued by her classmate Charlotte Savage—the rule-breaking, […]

Midway through his handsomely illustrated study of mapmaking, Cheshire quotes diarist Harold Nicolson’s eyewitness account of President Woodrow Wilson kneeling over a map at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, tracing new borders with his finger. The scene captures the book’s central concern: our enduring desire to organize the world through cartography. As the writer […]