STEPHANIE ALLISON

From bees to Steven Pinker, an eclectic lineup for August.

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
The Beekeeper’s Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes & Other Home Uses	Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch	A luxury publication that is nonetheless full of precise details on bees, beekeeping and honey, along with recipes and bee miscellanea. A reading left me not only with increased wonder for the bee, but also for the beekeeper—a good read that would make a generous gift.
The Old Capital	Yasunari Kawabata; translated by J. Martin Holman	A Kawabata title I have hoarded, since, like beach property, no more is being made. A postwar Kyoto tale offering Kawabata’s familiar meditation on modernity versus tradition; passages of piercing visual beauty and compressed episodes of sudden violence. The Old Capital is not a first Kawabata to read; better to pick up The Sound of the Mountain or Beauty and Sadness.
Kokoro	Natusme Soseki; translated by Edwin McClellan	This Soseki novel, like the Kawabata, investigates the effects of Japan’s very particular transition to modernity. Kokoro is set in the prewar period and revolves around the friendship of a younger man with an older man of great reserve. The translator’s notes were essential to me in framing the narrative. Plain and powerful.
Duveen: A Life in Art	Meryle Secrest	A thoroughgoing biography of the English art dealer and tastemaker. Duveen’s signal accomplishment was the transfer of masterworks from strapped British aristocrats to newly rich Americans. His problematic relationship with Bernard Berenson and the less-than-perfect integrity of the art trade are engaging subplots. Ultimately, this style of big popular biography is not for me, although I admire the undertaking.
Language: The Cultural Tool	Daniel L. Everett	Everett is a pioneering linguist whose Amazonian fieldwork has led him to disagree with the innatist, Chomskian account of language. Instead, he sees language as a product of general human intelligence that confers survival advantage. This book covers a great deal of ground, some biographical, for an author who has lived a big life. A born-again Christian as a young man, he loses his faith as he comes to know and appreciate tribal peoples. Interesting, generally clear and necessarily speculative in parts.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language	Steven Pinker	I skimmed this after having read it previously. It is the best-known popular account of the innatist theory of language, so makes a good counterpoint to Daniel Everett’s book. While the innatist account has shifted somewhat in the last 20 years, Pinker and Everett still offer very different accounts of our capacity to acquire and use language.
Foe	J.M. Coetzee	A reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story told from the vantage of a female castaway. In this telling, Friday is voiceless, the woman speaks but cannot construct her own narrative, and Defoe is the male transformer of all. Politics aside, Foe is filled with compelling set pieces and images. A yes for me, but perhaps not for faithful readers of Coetzee’s work.
Mormon Country	Wallace Stegner	Essays written by Stegner on Mormon history, especially their setting of Utah. The non-Mormon Stegner knows his west and the crazy toughness of the Mormon pioneers. Originally published in the 1940s, it holds together wonderfully as literary nonfiction. A pleasure to reread, with the Mittster in the headlines daily.
Finance and the Good Society	Robert J. Shiller	Shiller offers this as a primer and a manifesto on the financial system, setting out its actors, institutions and benefits. His faith in our collective capacity to regulate and positively innovate in finance to promote the general welfare is hard for me to share. This is a useful and quietly provocative book, even for the financially literate.

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