Reviews and Lectures

I'm feeling very grateful for Thow Xin Wei's incisive review of CONNOR & SEAL. He does not like everything about the book, but he expresses his reservations and insights with such understanding and empathy for the project of the book that I feel very much read. This is what true reading looks like. It takes time and thought, and to be given such time and thought is a great privilege.

"This stylistic cleavage is, perhaps, a consequence of the two-part structure Koh has borrowed from Thomas and Beulah, which emphasises the separation between the two sides. Taken pessimistically, one could point out how the form reflects a "disconnection" and isolation that is inherent in the human condition at every level: between individuals, genders, ethnicities, states and citizens, and nations. But one should also see how the formal division allows for a sustained and dedicated exploration of each side, allowing us to gain a sense of the richness within. Sale, for example, suggests that it is this "richness of individual lives" that allows us to "[mediate] the sadness of disconnection"."

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From TLS Oct 23, 2020:

Caryl Emerson's review of Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank:

There is a patience and wholesomeness to Frank's voice in these lectures that has its analogue in his monumental biography, where obsession and perversity are contextualized so thoroughly that they can seem traits of Dostoevsky's agitated era, not of his person. When Donald Fanger reviewed the third volume in April 1987, he noted astutely that Dostoevsky emerges "a man far less singular, impassioned, extreme than he is usually conceived to be".... Perhaps, Fanger suggests, "through a process of osmosis" we are witnessing Frank's own "sovereign balance and reasonableness seep into the character he is recreating". Frank does not co-opt Dostoevsky but cooperates with him, trusting his intentions, and in this sense Frank co-creates his biographical subject; he does not airbrush him out."

 

... Frank's Lectures portray Dostoevsky as above all responsive - to the publishing market, certainly, for he was a poor man, but more importantly to moral complacency.

 

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Paul Collier's review of The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel:

Yet something is lost in that translation of grace into a secular vocabulary. It is the need to transcend "me" and "now". In short, Sandel offers a profound critique of individualism, making the case for the move away from self to community, from "my wants now" to "the common good". By this approach we transcend ourselves neither by the utilitarian calculus of the biggest sum of utilities nor the Rawlsian contrivance of detachment from our place in society by a veil of ignorance, but rather through the satisfaction gained from fulfilling social obligations.

... Sandel's thesis is more accurately captured as one of "insiders" versus "outsiders", a distinction first formulated in the analysis of the labour market. Insiders have habitually defended privilege from outsiders: see the professionals such as lawyers, medics and accountants, whose high earnings are protected by their various associations through control of entry.... But insider advantage extends far beyond the labour market: many of our aspirations are set by the prevailing narratives of the privileged. In Happy Ever After (2019), the behavourial scientist Paul Dolan set out the evidence for "narrative traps". He showed how unwarranted norms set by the insider class, such as the over-emphasis on cognitive achievement, condemn the outsider class to a loss of respect and self-worth. 

... Insider privilege has become both educational and spatial: the cognitively endowed, clustered together in the metropolis, have life chances radically superior to those of the outsiders. And insider advantage, just like the class system that it replaced, replicates itself. By assortative mating and hothousing their children, the insiders pass their privilege on: they have rapidly become a hereditary caste. All have the opportunity to succeed but the insiders have decisively rearranged the ladders, while - especially on the Left - bemoaning the "inequality" for which they are primarily responsible.