THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 63
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Beauty in Breaking, by Michele Harper (Riverhead). This
memoir by an E.R. doctor suggests that emergency medi-
cine can heal its practitioners as well as its patients. As a
teen-ager, growing up among the Black élite of Washington,
D.C., the author drives her brother to the hospital one day
after their father bites him. The emergency room, “throb-
bing with life,” presents an escape from her family’s cycle of
abuse, and Harper becomes a determined careerist. Acutely
aware that Black women rarely achieve powerful positions
in her field, she climbs the ladder at hospitals in the Bronx
and Philadelphia, before switching to an under-resourced
V.A. hospital. A witness to “tortured flesh,” she finds that
her patients’ injuries often refract her own trauma, and she
attempts to treat with empathy rather than judgment.
Desert Notebooks, by Ben Ehrenreich (Counterpoint). Cata-
clysmic climate and cultural changes underpin this essay on
ecological destruction, which seeks to explain how we reached
a “too-warm abyss.” According to Ehrenreich, a climate jour-
nalist, human delusions of purpose and exceptionalism have
brought our planet to this point. Writing from deserts across
the Southwest—whose tenacious landscape is dotted with
Army bases and urban outposts—he draws on Mayan cre-
ation myths, anthropological accounts of the decimated Sioux,
and Presidential tweets to chronicle humankind’s destructive
nature. The breadth of reference lends perspective to our con-
tinuing struggle to achieve sustainability: as Ehrenreich writes,
“We are not the first people to believe we are living at the
end of time.”
Heaven and Earth, by Paolo Giordano, translated from the Ital-
ian by Anne Milano Appel (Pamela Dorman Books). In this
charged novel, Teresa, an Italian adolescent visiting her grand-
mother in Puglia, befriends three strange boys from a neigh-
boring farmhouse, who are being raised by an enigmatic re-
ligious man. She becomes involved with one of the boys, but
her family suppresses the relationship. Years later, the two re-
connect and begin living together at the old farmhouse,
among a group of environmental activists, whose radical ac-
tions lead to tragedy. What begins as a story of summer ro-
mance transforms into something more ambitious—an ac-
count of eco-terrorism—while also posing questions about
the nature of passionate attachment.
Love After Love, by Ingrid Persaud (One World). This conver-
sational novel, set in Trinidad, explores the intricacies of do-
mestic bonds. After Betty Ramdin’s abusive husband dies in
an accident, Betty is left alone with her young son. To make
ends meet, she rents her guesthouse to Mr. Chetan, an un-
assuming, reserved teacher—and a closeted gay man strug-
gling with their society’s pervasive homophobia. A make-
shift family forms, but this is not a simple, heartwarming
tale, and there are many dramatic twists. Most memorable,
though, are quieter moments, such as when Mr. Chetan cooks
roti or Betty avoids an annoying suitor.
ted disproportionately from the quotas
for government jobs that Ambedkar
(whom Wilkerson dubs “India’s Mar-
tin Luther King”) fought to write into
the Constitution. Over time, a small
Dalit élite, known as “the creamy layer,”
emerged. The B.J.P. recruited Dalits
who were beneath that layer and resent-
ful of it, promising them economic ad-
vancement. Simultaneously, the Party’s
networks tried to draw them into the
Hindu-supremacist fold by inciting fear
about a group even lower in the social
hierarchy: Indian Muslims. In 2019, fully
a third of Dalits voted for the B.J.P. in
national elections that returned Prime
Minister Narendra Modi to power.
Suraj Yengde, a Dalit scholar at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Govern-
ment, sees possible benefits in his caste’s
lack of unity. As parties compete for
their votes, he has argued, Dalits may
have a wider and less corrupt range of
candidates to choose from, and more
effective representation. But Yengde’s
sometime collaborator, the astringent,
seventy-year-old Dalit intellectual and
activist Anand Teltumbde (currently
imprisoned by the Modi government
on dubious charges of inciting violence),
perceives a larger political failure; he be-
lieves that “the debacle of the Dalit
movement” today lies in its inability to
recognize how class intersects with caste.
S
tarting in the nineteenth century,
low-caste Indians looked to Amer-
ica’s progressives for ideas about fight-
ing inequality. Jyotirao Phule, an anti-
Brahmin agitator from a lowly gardener
caste, dedicated his 1873 book, “Ghu-
lamgiri,” or “Slavery,” to American ab-
olitionists. A century later, young Dal-
its who had studied the Black Power
movement launched the Dalit Panthers.
In Wilkerson’s estimation, what Amer-
ica may teach the world in the coming
decades is, alas, how a numerically vul-
nerable dominant caste can cling to
power. She recounts a conversation she
had with the civil-rights historian Tay-
lor Branch about how American de-
mocracy will fare when it reaches a
demographic watershed: the moment in
the twenty-forties when non-Hispanic
whites are expected to see their major-
ity disappear. “So the real question
would be,” Branch says, “if people were
given the choice between democracy
