Charles KingGods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

moving to a different country, becoming a parent, or publishing a story. Zilberbourg portrays the truth and consequences of paths not taken. The nine-page title story, “Like Water,” is a good illustration. Beginning as a middleaged woman’s memoir set in southern California , it shifts to her youth in Leningrad. Midway into an account of three Russian teenage girls at a Pushkin play, the firstperson narrator switches abruptly to a new set of folks, declaring, “Here’s a story.” “Once upon a time,” there was an elderly couple in the Bronx—émigrés from the Soviet Union. Their doctor told them to drink water, lots of it, but they preferred tea. Gradually the California narrator works this new storyline back to the earlier one, identifying those thirsty old people as her grandparents . By offering them as a parable, she clarifies her current feelings about one of the Russian teenage friends who’s been in touch, while imagining other possibilities for her life had her parents not whisked her out of Leningrad to the US as an adolescent . This story, like others, exemplifies the difficulties of adapting to a new culture at a tender age. Zilberbourg shapes her character as a fish out of water, allowing her space to self-analyze by musing. We readers thus overhear her considerations. It’s a creative fictional construction. “Dr. Sveta” is another example of Zilberbourg ’s assemblage skills—a tale within a tale like a Russian doll, told by an older obstetrician at a dinner party to a young woman whose mother is urging her to have a baby. The labyrinthine network of two separate plots heightens the power of each. Many stories address mothering, particularly combined with employment. In the inventive “Dandelion,” an author mails off her nineteen-month-old child as a metaphorical manuscript to her New York publisher. Zilberbourg monitors the maternal phenomenon through generations as if turning a kaleidoscope to watch patterns shift from grandmother to mother to daughter. Zilberbourg avoids muddying with too much detail. To protagonists treading water in complicated situations, she tosses life preservers, empathizing with those wanting to alter their pasts. The experiences of these characters are not unlike scenes from their creator’s own life. Clearly Zilberbourg cares about the people who populate her stories, and therefore so do we. Like Water is a marvelous retrospective of women and their work. Why are there words? So imaginative authors like Olga Zilberbourg can paint prose with them. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Charles King Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century New York. Doubleday. 2019. 431 pages. GODS OF THE UPPER AIR tells the story of Franz Boas, an outspoken critic of white supremacists, and his profound influence on three students—Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston—and Native American linguist Ella Cara Deloria . In prose that reads like a good novel, Charles King gives us the backdrop, from the late 1800s through the formative years of this country’s identity, as white supremacy gained international influence and acquired territories beyond the continent. Uncomfortable with the label of colonizer, it was handy to have a theory that bolstered the claim of bringing the civilization of a more advanced race to these “backward” corners of the world. Why “Bramante’s staircase”? Wanting us to see as well as read, Valencia includes a few illustrations in “El demonio de Cantu ña,” the sixth and final section based on folklore about how Quito’s sixteenthcentury San Francisco church (originally designed for the Vatican by the fifteenth– century Italian architect Bramante) was completed by an indigenous blacksmith who made a pact with the devil and won. The circular, concave, and convex staircase is a metaphor of what transpires in the novel, of the inevitable dialogues among cultures, and ultimately of the novelist’s ethics. It is not lost on readers that a work of art devised by a European is somehow perfected by an Ecuadorian Amerindian. There is no specific Latin American or Spanish novelistic tradition, cosmopolitan or regional, to which Valencia is beholden. He creates his own from a larger worldview , skeptical of the...