THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 83
the daughter of a high-ranking U.S.
Army officer. She went to Oberlin, then
transferred to Teachers College, where
she received a bachelor’s degree in 1915.
In her final year, she received a sum-
mons from Boas, who enlisted her in a
lifelong project of his, recording Native
American languages.
Deloria was never officially a Boas
student. But she worked as his assistant
and attended some of his lectures, and
he employed her to fact-check the work
of early ethnologists and linguists who
had studied the Plains Indians. Boas
was not surprised to learn that a lot of
their findings were worthless. In 1941,
the year before Boas died, he and De-
loria published “Dakota Grammar.” King
says it is one of the few works in his ca-
reer that Boas agreed to co-author.
Of the women King writes about,
Ruth Benedict was professionally the
closest to Boas. She had a bachelor’s de-
gree from Vassar and got interested in
anthropology when she took courses at
the New School. She entered the grad-
uate program at Columbia in 1921, and,
after getting her degree, became what
King calls Boas’s “lieutenant” in the de-
partment. Boas struggled to get her a
regular faculty position; she was finally
made an assistant professor in 1931.
When Boas retired, Benedict was the
most famous member of the Colum-
bia department. Her book “Patterns of
Culture,” a study of three groups—the
Zuñi (of the American Southwest), the
Kwakiutl (of British Columbia), and the
Dobu (of Papua New Guinea)—was
published in 1934 and became one of
the best-selling works of academic an-
thropology ever written. The university,
it is almost unnecessary to say, decided
to go with a man as the new chair. He
was Ralph Linton, a critic of Benedict’s
work. They did not get along.
In 1946, Benedict published a sec-
ond fantastically popular book, “The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” a
study of the culture of Japan. Linton
left Columbia that year and Benedict
was finally promoted to full professor
in 1948. Two months later, she had a
heart attack and died. She was sixty-one.
It was Benedict who recruited Mar-
garet Mead to anthropology. Mead en-
tered Barnard as a sophomore in 1920.
She was an English major, then a double
English and psychology major, but she
BRIEFLY NOTED
Travelers, by Helon Habila (Norton). The narrator of this novel
is a Nigerian graduate student who moves from Virginia to
Berlin with his wife, when she is awarded a fellowship to
paint portraits of migrants. His literary perspective on mi-
gration is challenged by encounters with people from around
the world who now live precariously, and far from their Eu-
ropean dream. “Even in Berlin I miss Berlin,” one of them
observes. When the narrator loses his documents, after pick-
ing up the wrong bag on a train, he finds himself in depor-
tation proceedings, among those whose lives he previously
contemplated from a seemingly secure position. The book’s
elaborate depiction of a range of personal sacrifices brings
into focus the human tragedies obscured by statistics and dis-
cussions of public policy.Screen Tests, by Kate Zambreno (Harper Perennial). In the first
part of this book, fifty-eight micro-fictions eulogize the figures
whose lives and work are a balm for the disillusioned author.
Susan Sontag, John Wayne, Valerie Solanas, and Elena Ferrante
all inspire the narrator’s meandering meditations on writing,
aging, and failing. In the second section, four previously pub-
lished essays reprise scenes from the first and consider life at
the margins of society. As a published author, Zambreno frets
over her own Wikipedia page and Googles herself compulsively,
pitting a desire for success against her fascination with failure.
The two sections cohere pleasingly, playing with the some-
times artificial distinction between fiction and nonfiction.Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, by Simon Critchley (Pantheon).
“Every generation has to reinvent the classics,” the author, a
prolific philosopher, writes. That’s not a radical statement, but
it gains force through frank, personal readings of hallowed
plots, including Euripides’ “Trojan Women” and Aeschylus’
Oresteia. For Critchley, tragedy is neither a staid moral pur-
gative—as Aristotle’s Poetics might suggest—nor an ethical
emergency, as the “savage critique” in Plato’s Republic would
have it. Rather, it’s an expression of unsettled humanity, and
an enduring corrective to what Critchley sees as philosophy’s
traditional commitment to the “ideal of a noncontradictory
psychic life.” Theorizing theatre, then, is “the very opposite of
any and all kinds of cultural conservatism.” Pay attention and
you can reinvent your life.And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, by Lawrence Weschler (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux). A longtime staff writer at this magazine,
Weschler set out a generation ago to write a profile of the
British-born neurologist Oliver Sacks. Weschler was alive to
the doctor’s eccentric brilliance, compassion, personal quirks,
and secrets. At first, Sacks was a willing subject, but then he
pulled back, later writing his own memoir-confessional. This
intelligent, strange, sometimes maddeningly digressive book
is, in genre terms, neither fish nor fowl but, rather, some other
odd, often delightful animal. It’s at once the story of a com-
plicated man, of a lasting friendship, and of a failed project
that is finally rescued.