Atlas’s Bones, by D. Vance Smith (Chicago). Encompassing Africana studies, medieval scholarship, historiography, and philosophy, this book surveys centuries of literature, history, and theology to argue for Africa’s influence on Europe’s self-conception. Hegel’s fantasy that Africa “is no historical place in the world” guides Smith as he leaps from ancient civilizations, such as those of Alexandria and Carthage, to close readings of Virgil, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Auerbach. Smith’s synthesis of a wide range of sources, from antiquity to the modern era, strengthens his central claim: that “Africa was not only known to Europeans but played a profound role in how Europeans imagined both the world and themselves.”
Everything Is Photograph, by Patricia Albers (Other Press). This biography tracks the triumphs and the travails of the twentieth-century Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Kertész’s compositions are notably strange—often off center and taken from high angles, they appear like nervous half glances at scenes of pedestrian shuffle—and many are reproduced here, enriched by thorough commentary by Albers. Her exploration of Kertész’s time as an infantryman in the First World War is especially illuminating, as she documents the curiously “flirtatious tender touch” with which he photographed his surroundings. This kind of artistic contradiction becomes a theme, as Albers unfurls details about Kertész’s romantic life, his move to America, and his later fame.
