Plus: Food Pantries in Crisis; Harold Sonny Ladoo; King Edward VIII
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Jé Wilson fathoms the briny; Christopher Bosso looks at the growing hunger crisis in America; Colin Grant reads Harold Sonny Ladoo’s unforgettable novels; and, from the archives, Noel Annan on Edward VIII’s abdication. Memoirs of survival at sea plunge the reader deep into the heart of human nature. Food banks were meant to be America’s safety net of last resort. As further SNAP cuts loom, how much weight can they bear? The Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays is relentlessly rude and crude, but also bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable. Free from the ArchivesEighty-nine years ago today Edward VIII, King of the United Kingdom and British Dominions (and Emperor of India), abdicated the throne, determined instead to marry the divorcée Wallis Simpson. In the Review’s September 8, 1966, issue—when Edward, by then titled Duke of Windsor, was seventy-two—Noel Annan wrote about the abdication, “the most celebrated non-event of recent British history”: “It changed nothing. The political and social configurations in the country were unaltered; it had no effect upon the United Kingdom’s relations with other members of the Commonwealth; British foreign policy was unaffected; and scarcely any difference in the delicate balance of power between the political personalities of the day could be perceived when it was over.” “Like many upper-class Englishmen of his generation, bewildered by the failure of parliamentary democracy to cope with the economic and social problems of the times, he felt the attraction of the fascist dictators in their early days, and opposed Eden’s policy of sanctions against Mussolini in the Abyssinian war for fear of driving him into the arms of Hitler. It is true that when he came to the throne he had cut himself off from the rest of the Royal Family, politicians, and the Establishment and had no notion of the fact that if as King he were to exert an influence, he must work through them.” “The idea of the West as a cultural community appeared amid the scattered remains of that community. It may refer to any number of ‘essences,’ some of them (such as liberty and Christianity) in poor agreement with one another, but two things have remained constant: the threat from Russia on the outside and the fear of decay on the inside.” “The language of these policies usually distinguishes men from women by their reproductive capacity, which is assumed to be determined at birth or even at conception.… Some purport to be establishing a ‘women’s bill of rights,’ as the titles of Kansas’s and Oklahoma’s bills suggest; Louisiana’s is titled ‘The Women’s Safety and Protection Act.’ (On the other hand, the name of North Dakota’s bill—into which legislators slipped another term they wanted to define—captures the arbitrariness involved: ‘The Definition of Female, Male, Sex, and Scrap Metal Dealer.’)” Special Offer
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