Robert Jones Jr.’s powerful debut novel
“spares no detail in its brutal telling of
the American past,” said David Canfield
in Entertainment Weekly. But it also
“pits love against cruelty,” focusing on a
tender same-sex romance between two
teenage slaves on a Mississippi planta-
tion. Samuel and Isaiah’s connection is
initially inspiring to their peers, until an
older slave curries favor with their owner
by spreading Christian teachings that re-
sult in the two teens being shunned. The
story often feels almost biblical; indeed,
its “dreamy realism“recalls the work of
Toni Morrison. The sprawling narrative,
which even reaches back to Samuel’s and
Isaiah’s African ancestors, “might have
benefited from more judicious editing,”
said Naomi Jackson in The Washington
Post. Still, The Prophets is “an important
contribution to American letters.” Too
often, enslaved people are depicted in lit-
erature “either as vessels for sadistic vio-
lence or as noble, superhuman warriors
for liberation.” Here, they are granted
deep interiority. “Even in the face of in-
credible oppression,” they “love fiercely
and dreamed freely.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
As Gabrielle Glaser’s new book nears its final
pages, “many readers will find themselves
moved to tears,” said Marion Winik in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune. Margaret Erle
Katz and her first child should never have
been separated, and the heartache the two
experienced proves to be emblematic of mil-
lions of similar stories. Katz, we learn, had
the misfortune of becoming pregnant during
a 25-year postwar era when a “nasty” com-
bination of social and economic forces com-
pelled many unwed young women to check
into maternity homes where they gave birth
and immediately signed the infants away for
adoption. It was a profit-making system that
harmed both mother and child, and Glaser
tells the personal story and the larger tale in
“often pleasurably novelistic detail.”
Had Margaret Erle become pregnant at
16 before 1940, “things would probably
Harvard astro-
physicist Avi Loeb
attracted a lot of
press in 2018, said
Elizabeth Kolbert
in The New Yorker.
“Not surprisingly,
much of the atten-
tion was unflat-
tering.” Loeb had
defied conventional
scientific wisdom
by proposing that a
mysterious object detected by an observa-
tory telescope the year before was most
elegantly explained as the handiwork of
aliens. Now he has written a book for
lay readers that details his argument and
exhorts the scientific establishment to be
less closed-minded. Extraterrestrial seems
“a good deal more likely” to be remem-
bered as a curiosity than as a courageous
stand by a scientist ahead of his time. Still,
it’s interesting to read.
Earlier in his career, “Loeb made important
contributions to astrophysics and cosmol-
ogy,” said astrophysicist Ethan Siegel in
Book of the week
have worked out differently,” said Raquel
Laneri in The New York Post. Families of
the 1920s and ’30s often arranged shotgun
weddings, and maternity houses helped
unwed mothers keep their children. But in
1961—a time when premarital pregnancies
were soaring—middle-class parents were
more likely than before to treat a teenage
pregnancy as an obstacle to a stable,
happy life. Even though Margaret and her
boyfriend wanted to keep their baby and
wound up marrying just two years later,
she entered a Staten Island, N.Y., maternity
home at her mother’s insistence. Denied a
chance to even hold the baby and threat-
ened with juvenile detention, Margaret
signed away her parental rights. She was
told a diplomat was waiting to adopt the
infant but instead her boy stayed in foster
care for eight months. The agency that
ran the facility sold access to the infants
to researchers, including one who had the
harebrained notion that he could measure
intelligence by how loudly each baby cried
when he snapped elastic bands at their feet.
As readers learn early on, Margaret Katz
eventually did reconnect with her son, said
Lisa Belkin in The New York Times. David
Rosenberg, a Portland, Ore., cantor, had
been looking for her, too, and he had suf-
fered health problems for years that might
have been addressed earlier if Katz hadn’t
been blocked from passing relevant genetic
information to him. Their 2014 reunion
turned out to be heartwarming but pro-
foundly bittersweet. Glaser never presents
the story as belonging only to a dark past,
because U.S. adoption practices still have
not been fully reformed. Though her book
is not the first to question the ethics of the
postwar adoption industry, it now stands as
“the most comprehensive and damning.”
American Baby: A Mother, a
Child, and the Shadow History
of Adoption
by Gabrielle Glaser (Viking, $28)
Novel of the week
The Prophets
by Robert Jones Jr. (Putnam, $27)
Extraterrestrial: The First Sign
of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
by Avi Loeb (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)
Forbes.com. But he has latched on to an
idea that “absolutely defies the scientific
evidence.” The unusual object he’s talking
about, known as Oumuamua, was indeed
special. It was the first object observed
passing through our solar system that
we are certain originated outside of it. It
behaved oddly, moving at unprecedented
speed and accelerating as if propelled by a
force other than gravity. But astrophysicists
can explain those peculiarities without
resorting to speculation about aliens. In
fact, predictions had been made that we
would begin seeing meteor-like objects from
other star systems as the power of tele-
scopes increased. Though Loeb is “impossi-
ble to prove wrong,” he stubbornly ignores
the superior explanations offered by many
other experts in his field.
Extraterrestrial is “a pretty thin book,”
offering only a short discussion of
Oumuamua itself, said Oliver Moody in
The Times (U.K.). Still, Loeb exhibits “an
omnivorous spirit of inquiry” that astrono-
mer Carl Sagan would have enjoyed. And as
engaging as Loeb is in discussing astrophys-
ics, said Becky Ferreira in The Washington
Post, he writes most memorably about
“down to earth” subjects, such as dreaming
up new studies with protégés and collecting
shells on the beach with his daughters.
Katz today, with baby David and her husband
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