STEPHANIE ALLISON

Stephanie Allison lives in New York City and often reads about neuroethics.

DAILY: New York Times (online and print), Wall Street Journal, Financial Times (online and print), Washington Post (online), New York Post (online), Science Daily (online), Three Quarks Daily, Politico.com
WEEKLY: Economist, Guardian Weekly, New Yorker, National Review (online)
BI-WEEKLY: New York Review of Books
MONTHLY: Harper’s, Atlantic, Allure, Bitch, Vogue, Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, Nature, Neuroscience

TITLE	AUTHOR	COMMENT
Man With the Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud	Martin Gayford	Some ruminations on sitting for Lucian Freud, along with bits of biography, accounts of Freud’s working practices and gentle gossip from critic Gayford. Luxury production values include a generous body of full-color images. Adds up to more than an amusement, but less substantial than one would have liked.
Ransom	David Malouf	This short novel is a fleshed-out imagining of Priam’s undertaking to plead for Hector’s body from Achilles. I found it entirely persuasive and fully imagined, and would have wished for more if the narrative did not firmly dictate its own limit.
Don’t Call It Night	Amos Oz	Relationship story and village social comedy embedded in a deep sense of place—in this case, nation’s edge Israel circa 1990. As usual, a work suffused with Oz’s complex understanding of his country. I find his female characters and gender relations slightly queasy-making in this work, but no matter.
Tinkers	Paul Harding	Water-clear with a few bravura set pieces, this is a seductive read that ends beautifully.
Humiliation	Wayne Koestenbaum	Koestenbaum takes all possible positions while thinking through the meaning of humiliation—the humiliated one, the abuser, the witness. Of course, he turns us into witnesses as well, so there is a repulsion quotient imposed on the reader.
The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies	Marcel Mauss	A reread of this 1920s work of anthropology and social theory that still claims intellectual descendants—an academic classic. I find myself returning to these observations when thinking about our current economic problems.
Gift Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmologies	Katherine Rupp	An anthropologist’s report on why and how Japanese give gifts. She considers historical changes in gift exchange practice and differences in giving among groups. Like the Mauss, provokes thought on our own practices of exchange, gift and otherwise.
The Gift	Lewis Hyde	My original copy was subtitled “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.” In its current edition the subtitle is “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” which has an unfortunate self-help ring to it. Neither captures the sense of this idiosyncratic work—which is not rigorous where it should be, and is romantic when it should be hard-headed, and yet presents so well Hyde’s sense from the trenches of a literary life that current modes of market exchange are impoverished and impoverishing.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940	Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, editors	Because the second volume of Beckett’s letters has been published, I was willing to finish reading the first. He is always acute, quick and coruscatingly funny—for me an unmissable read. This edition is a full scholarly treatment with detailed notes, often of great interest to this general reader.

Click here for more Reading List articles.

Comments are closed