For instance, Zukin explains “how Brooklyn became cool” owing to the migration of suburban-born trendsetters back to the neighborhoods their grandparents struggled to escape. She describes a new Harlem Renaissance, symbolized by Starbucks and McDonald’s, which has nothing in common with its cultural namesake. Whether in the upscale transformation of her East Village neighborhood or the Latino green market sprouting near IKEA on the once derelict waterfront, she constantly questions the mutable notion of “authenticity.”
Despite the obligatory academic citations, this is scholarship with its boots on the ground, challenging us to look at the familiar in a new light.
LA’S ORCHESTRA SAVES THE WORLD
By Alexander McCall Smith
Pantheon, 304 pp., $23.95
In this difficult-to-characterize novel by Alexander McCall Smith, a young woman named Lavender, known as “La,” abandons London in the late 1930s for rural East Anglia, on the run from a broken marriage, a broken heart. Once war breaks out, she longs to make herself useful, but returning to London, now terrorized by the Blitz, is impossible.
To fill the hours La takes up the flute. When an officer from the nearby RAF airbase remarks that his combat-weary men would be grateful for a chance to play music, La organizes a village orchestra. One player intrigues her in particular: Feliks, a gallant but mysterious Polish airman grounded by injury.
The amateur musicians develop an almost mystical faith in the power of La’s orchestra to usher them to victory and peace. But we are merely told this, never shown it, as the novel keeps flitting among various narrative options, by turns a nostalgic village sketch, a wartime thriller, and a better-late-than-never romance.
HERGÉ:
The Man Who Created Tintin
By Pierre Assouline
Translated, from the French, by Charles Ruas
Oxford University, 288 pp. $24.95
