Lucky Break Research Articles

Lucky Breaks and Funny Coincidences: From the Tragedy of Desire to the Messianic Psychoanalysis of Love

Lucky Breaks and Funny Coincidences: From the Tragedy of Desire to the Messianic Psychoanalysis of Love

MORAL AND ETHICAL COMPONENT OF SCIENCE IN TIMES OF WAR

MORAL AND ETHICAL COMPONENT OF SCIENCE IN TIMES OF WAR

Not all luck is created equal: Sources of income inequality and willingness to redistribute

Despite steadily rising inequality in the US over the last few decades, demand for increasing tax rates and redistribution has not increased. A growing literature argues that one reason for this is that people might perceive inequality to be fair. This literature has documented that Americans tend to perceive economic inequality stemming from merit as being fair and inequality stemming from luck as unfair. However, “lucky breaks” in the real world do not necessarily come from a lottery or random chance but from the actions of the government favoring a “lucky” few. People might be more willing to redistribute if it compensates those negatively affected by government action. Using an online experiment we show that luck stemming from the action of a government-like actor influences individuals’ desire to redistribute earnings making them more likely to favor redistribution than in instances where inequality is caused by merit or by random luck.

"mama is reading a history of russian death …"

"mama is reading a history of russian death …" Konstantin Shavlovsky (bio) Translation from the Russian mama is reading a history of russian deathI'm reading Paul B. Preciadowe're both preparing to transition at which stage do we turn the page mama it's not black and whitewe're the bad guys, we're foolsit's the phantoms in the kitchencircling around your foot there goes granny with her hornshere comes that faceless auntlittle people, common folkread that tale to the end breathe into the balmy windsave it for a rainy dayone white night a dirty phantomwith the lilacs had his way not at all white, death burns therenot at all bare, life stands there I do not recognize this fatal farethis taste of Pushkin in my mouth [End Page 47] Editorial note: Turn to page 58 to read the translator's biographies. Konstantin Shavlovsky Konstantin Shavlovsky is a poet, cinema critic, publisher, curator, and the founder/executive manager of the Saint Petersburg bookstore Word Order. He has worked as an editor for Seance magazine, published extensively on Russian cinema, and curated multiple interdisciplinary cinema projects. He is the author of two books of poetry and resides in Tbilisi, Georgia. Polina Barskova Polina Barskova is a poet and scholar who teaches Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of twelve collections of poetry and two books of prose in Russian as well as of the monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2017). Her recent creative nonfiction collection, Living Pictures (2022), was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. Her collections of poetry in English translation include This Lamentable City, The Zoo in Winter, Relocations, and, most recently, Air Raid. D. Brian Kim D. Brian Kim is a scholar of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the theory and practice of literary translation and cultural exchange. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Eugene Ostashevsky Eugene Ostashevsky is the author, most recently, of The Feeling Sonnets (2022). As a translator of experimental literature in Russian, he has worked on futurism, the OBERIU group, and contemporary poetry, as well as Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets (2022). Bela Shayevich Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American writer and translator. Elaine Wilson Elaine Wilson is a writer, literary translator, language instructor, and PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Reviewed by: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets Ali Kinsella Yevgenia Belorusets Lucky Breaks Trans. Eugene Ostashevsky. New York. New Directions. 2022. 112 pages. LUCKY BREAKS, by Yevgenia Belorusets, is an experimental approach to the novel that neither follows a traditional story arc nor adheres to strict notions of fiction or non. Comprising thirty vignettes, the book offers glimpses of Ukraine following the 2014 Russian invasion through the lives of ordinary women whose lives have been upset by displacement, death, and loss. Individually no one story serves as a synecdoche for life in contemporary Ukraine, but collectively they offer a polyphonic portrait of a resilient society under siege. Belorusets mostly works as a photographer, which is reflected in her storytelling—momentary glimpses wrapped in imagined histories. Despite its short one hundred pages, the slim volume (printed in an unusually small typeface) is a bit of a slog. The intense brutality of war, which cuts people off from their pasts and futures, operates on the page as well. Belorusets's fractured ultrapresent may well reflect the reality of life in a prolonged, stagnant war. As a novel, however, it fails to provide the cohesion and momentum that pull a reader from one existential disappointment to the next flash of mundane happiness. Perhaps it is better to think of it as a collection of prose poetry, which might also be how translator (and poet) Eugene Ostashevsky sees it. If it is dipped into sporadically, rather than read straight through, each story imprints on the imagination without getting lost in the litany of despair. Fortuitously timed for its publisher, Lucky Breaks offers us an opportunity to reflect on the politics of publishing. Belorusets writes in Russian and has here a Russian-born translator. Neither of these facts is inherently objectionable. Today, however, when the literary world has taken a sudden, intense interest in words coming out of Ukraine, there is a severe dearth of Ukrainian material available in English. Most books on top 10 lists about Ukraine are not written by Ukrainians. The prizewinning I Will Die in a Foreign Land was not written by a Ukrainian. As a translator of Ukrainian myself, I know there are books and articles and essays that deserve a wide, English-speaking readership, yet the link between Ukrainian pen and American press is mostly missing. At a time when Ukrainian culture and language are enduring their most intense attack since the early twentieth century, what does it mean for we anglophones to persist in approaching the country via a colonial power? If nothing else, why are we not more curious about the power of this language that the Russian Empire has fought to suppress, to the brink of self-destruction and the collapse of democracy? (Editor's note: To read Michael M. Naydan's recent recommended reading list of more than forty works by Ukrainian writers translated into English, visit worldlit.org.) Ali Kinsella Chicago Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Probit and Wealth Inequality—How Random Events and the Laws of Probability Are Partially Responsible for Wealth Inequality

Using two very simple coin-toss games, we demonstrate how the laws of probability affect wealth distribution. Even in a group of people who are identical in every way and are only subject to random costs (such as that incurred from severe weather, major illness, and bad accidents) or random benefits (such as those derived from lucky breaks), the distribution of wealth will be nudged towards taking the shape of the normal distribution’s cousin, the probit, with its very unequal allocation. The larger these random costs and benefits are and the more frequently they occur, the more severe inequality will become. Moreover, the inequality will tend to be most extreme at the very top and very bottom of the wealth distribution, reflecting the asymptotic curls at either end of the probit curve.

‘Don't educate them out of educating themselves’: A conversation with Al Wunder

Al Wunder's biography, in his own words: I had four lucky breaks that precipitated my becoming a teacher of improvised movement theatre. Between the ages of eight and fourteen I broke my right leg four different times. In 1962, I began modern dance classes with Alwin Nikolais as a physical therapy. His choreography and improvisation sections of class inspired me to teach and perform professionally. I spent eight years studying, teaching, choreographing, and performing with Nikolais.1970 saw me move to the San Francisco Bay area where I opened a dance studio teaching Nikolais dance technique and improvisation. In 1971, I joined forces with Terry Sendgraff and Ruth Zaporah creating The Berkeley Dance Theater & Gymnasium. My focus was to create a way to teach dance technique through improvisation. I met my Australian wife, Lynden Nicholls, in 1981 when she came to study Motivity at Terry’s studio in Berkeley. In 1982, I moved to Melbourne, Australia where Lynden and I set up a dance studio. My focus changed from teaching dance technique improvisationally to teaching improvised movement theatre performance.Over the next thirty years I developed a pedagogy that inspired professional and non-professional performers to create improvised movement theatre pieces. In 2006, I self-published a book, The Wonder of Improvisation. In 2017, a documentary was made by Michelle Dunn, The Wonder of Improvisation. In 2021, a book was written by Hilary Elliott and published by Routledge, The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder.

Scientific Research: Fun and Excitement for Me … And You!

This brief article is directed towards young readers, perhaps in their teens, who might be thinking about their future careers and the paths that they might like to follow in later life. I give them for consideration an outline of the fun and excitement that I have myself experienced in scientific research, and encourage them to follow me. To do this, I start by giving some remarks about my own early life and its choices. I then identify some of the decisions and lucky breaks that led to my main scientific work on the theories of stability, nonlinear dynamics and chaos. I point to some new frontiers where knowledge of the physical sciences is spreading into wider areas such as the bio-mechanics of DNA and the prediction of tipping points that could dramatically increase global warming. Finally I give some detailed advice that could be useful as you hopefully enter the thrilling world of scientific research.

Thought, Choice, and Other Causes in Aristotle’s Account of Luck

Abstract In Physics 2.4–6, Aristotle offers an account of things that happen “by luck” (ἀπὸ τύχης) and “spontaneously” (ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτομάτου). Many of these things are what we might think of as “lucky breaks”: cases where things go well for us, even though we don’t expect them to. In Physics 2.5, Aristotle illustrates this idea with the case of a man who goes to the market for some reason unrelated to collecting a debt he is owed (197a17–8). While he is there, this man just so happens to run into his debtor and get his money back—which is what he “wanted” all along (196a4). This case has a number of features that have proved puzzling. Most notably, Aristotle seems to think that while “it happened accidentally to him to come and to do this for the sake of getting the money”, nevertheless the man “did not come for the sake of this”—though he “would have” (196b34–6). What must such a proceeding be like to be described in these ways? Physics 2.4–6 makes several important moves towards answering this question. One of them—among the earliest and seemingly a foundational one—is the claim that “for the sake of something are as many things as could be done by thought and by nature” (196b21–2). The aim of this paper is to identify the role that this claim plays in Aristotle’s account of spontaneous proceedings. It defends two main claims. First, Aristotle’s suggestion that spontaneous proceedings could be done by nature and by thought is the product of a more general strategy. His approach is to sketch an intuitive pattern of explanation for proceedings that happen for the sake of something in the ordinary—non-spontaneous—way, and then to try to extend that model to the case of things that do so spontaneously, preserving as much of it as possible. Applying this strategy reveals that whereas nature and thought in fact function as efficient causes of ordinary proceedings that are for the sake of something, this cannot be the case in spontaneous ones. Instead, nature and thought could function as their causes. Second, I argue that Aristotle’s implementation of this strategy is rooted in his account of causation and especially Physics 2.3’s list of “modes” (τρόποι) of causes. When he claims that spontaneous proceedings “could” be done by nature and by thought, he is saying that nature (in natural cases) and thought (in practical ones) are their efficient causes in capacity. In the practical case, spontaneous proceedings are caused by agents who have certain capacities, connected with their desires and abilities. In the right circumstances, these agents would actively exercise those capacities in acting for the sake of a given end.

Choice or circumstance: When are women penalized for their success?

AbstractPast research shows that successful women in traditionally masculine roles often experience interpersonal penalties not sustained by similarly successful men. In two studies we, addressed the question of how the perceived motivation of women for counter‐stereotypical positions affects whether such penalties occur. Specifically, we investigated whether women who are successful in male gender‐typed roles are less likely to be penalized when their attainment of the role is due to circumstance than to focused and intentional goal pursuit. In Study 1, we compared reactions to women and men who had been successful in a leadership role on a STEM project and showed that when a woman had been arbitrarily assigned to the leadership role she incurred fewer interpersonal penalties than when she had actively pursued it. In Study 2, we replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating similar effects for a successful woman in a financial position when she had attained her position due to a series of lucky breaks rather than purposeful goal‐directed efforts. The results of these studies support the idea that the perception that women have actively chosen to pursue counter‐normative goals plays an important role in determining whether they are penalized for their success in traditionally male domains. It was not simply being in the role, but how she got there, that determined whether the derogation and dislike shown to be directed at successful women in past research occurred.

Bisphosphonates and breast cancer - From cautious palliation to saving lives.

Bone metastases are common in breast cancer and may cause considerable morbidity including fractures, severe pain, nerve compression and hypercalcaemia. Alongside developments in the multidisciplinary management for patients with metastatic breast cancer, the use of bisphosphonates, and more recently denosumab, has transformed the course of advanced breast cancer for many patients resulting in a major reduction in skeletal complications, reduced bone pain and improved quality of life. Additionally, because the bone marrow microenvironment is so intimately involved in the metastatic processes required for cancer dissemination, the use of adjuvant bisphosphonates has been studied extensively over the past 25years in many randomised trials. We now have clear evidence that bisphosphonates significantly reduce both metastasis to bone and mortality in postmenopausal women with early breast cancer. Efficacy seems similar across different biological subgroups of postmenopausal breast cancer with the use of either a nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate such as intravenous zoledronate or daily oral ibandronate as well as the non-nitrogen containing agent, daily oral clodronate. In this overview of evolving role of bisphosphonates in breast cancer, focussing particularly on pamidronate and zoledronate, the long winding development road from the 1970s through to the present day is described and some of the serendipitous findings, "lucky breaks" and regulatory decisions along the way outlined.

A Tribute to Richard M. Crooks on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday

A Tribute to Richard M. Crooks on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday

Futurelessness, migration, or a lucky break: narrative tropes of the ‘blocked future’ among Serbian high school students

ABSTRACTThis article uses ethnographic discourse analysis to understand how Serbian high school students at ‘Belgrade Professional’ (BP) respond to coursework and discussions about their individual futures. Contextualizing the conversations at BP within broader local and international social forces, the paper shows how students’ perceptions of their future chances are mediated by both the school’s outdated promises of secure skilled employment and a broad understanding of Western liberal democracies as ‘meritocratic’. In short, I argue that BP students recognize the elective ‘choice biography’ as a real pathway to adulthood. However, they primarily imagine the choice biography as existing outside of Serbia, while feeling constrained by – even hostile to – such an idea within the country. To counter choice biography framings of futures in Serbia, students mobilize a discourse I call the ‘blocked future’, comprised of three related narrative tropes informed by the decades-long recession: domestic futurelessness, meritocracy abroad, and local chance. These narrative tropes illuminate the emerging cultural structures in Serbia which reflect how people cope with and processes the conflicting structural demands and unfulfilled promises of the post-socialist transition in everyday life.

Mobile Work, Veterinary Subjectivity and Brexit: Veterinary Surgeons’ Migration to the UK

AbstractThis article extends studies of ‘global work’ by considering the mobility of veterinary surgeons in the global countryside. The article develops the concept of ‘disease ecology’: an assemblage of heterogenous actors and relations that inscribe and normalise mobility within professional subjectivities. Disruptions to these disease ecologies can contribute to new patterns of mobility. Drawing on biographical narrative interviews with 35 vets who have migrated to the United Kingdom to work, the article shows how veterinary mobility is shaped by and emerges in response to these disease ecologies. Specifically, the article describes how four narratives – ‘the first job’, ‘escape and adventure’, ‘the lucky break’ and ‘staying mobilities’ – contribute to veterinary migration to the UK, and how the lived experiences of work and inscriptions of mobile veterinary subjectivities within disease ecologies lead vets to stay in the UK. However, the article also considers the role of Brexit in disrupting established disease ecologies and creating new patterns of veterinary mobilities. In identifying how Brexit challenges vets’ sense of place, the article concludes by exploring Brexit's potential impact to the future of veterinary services in the UK.

The discovery of chemically produced mass independent isotope effects: The physical chemistry basis and applications to the early solar system, planetary atmospheres, and the origin of life

The discovery of chemically produced mass independent isotope effects: The physical chemistry basis and applications to the early solar system, planetary atmospheres, and the origin of life

Recovering Keynesian Phillips curve theory: hysteresis of ideas and the natural rate of unemployment

Economic theory is prone to hysteresis. Once an idea is adopted, it is difficult to change. In the 1970s, the economics profession abandoned the Keynesian Phillips curve and adopted Milton Friedman's natural rate of unemployment (NRU) hypothesis. The shift was facilitated by a series of lucky breaks. Despite much evidence against the NRU, and much evidence and theoretical argument supportive of the Keynesian Phillips curve, the NRU hypothesis remains ascendant. The hypothesis has had an enormous impact on macroeconomic theory and policy. 2018 is the 50th anniversary of Friedman's introduction of the NRU hypothesis. The anniversary offers an opportunity to challenge rather than celebrate it.

Manpasand Beverages Ltd: Agile Capabilities for Sustained Growth

The case tells the story of a first generation entrepreneur, Dhirendra Singh, and his struggle for 15 years to establish a mango pulp based beverage marketing company without any external support and funding. The case highlights the travails that Dhirendra goes through in marketing an undifferentiated product, a mango drink. He survives, largely due to his grit and some lucky breaks, until an external funding agency notices him 15 years after he started his journey.With growth and stability (in 2017, it was the fourth largest packaged beverage in India) come new issues for the enterprise to grapple with. The case leaves the reader to reflect upon these challenges that the company encounters. Can the company overcome these hurdles and thrive? How, is the question that remains unanswered.

Illegal by Eoin Colfer

Reviewed by: Illegal by Eoin Colfer Elizabeth Bush Colfer, Eoin Illegal; by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin; illus. by Giovanni Rigano. Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2018 [128p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4926-6214-3 $19.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-4926-6582-3 $14.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-10 In narration that moves between “Then” and “Now,” twelve-year-old Ghanaian refugee Ebo recounts his harrowing flight from his village on the heels of his older brother, Kwame, who left to get a toehold in Europe, where he hoped to find their older sister, get work, and send for Ebo. Ebo couldn’t wait, and readers piece together his route and his resourcefulness in securing passage with no money to his name. The graphic novelization may be fictional, but the details are heartbreaking and convincing, as Ebo schmoozes his way onto a bus; sells antiseptic wipes that fell off the back of a truck in Agadez, Niger; reunites with Kwame and takes off northward across the desert with shady traffickers; and finally, in Tripoli, secures a place on a boat bound for Italy. It is on the leaky, overcrowded inflatable raft that the “Now” plot thread unwinds, as fourteen hapless refugees run out of food and water and, finally, hope, only to be saved by a ship. There’s still tragedy to come, though, and Ebo faces unbearable loss before he’s delivered to a refugee center and ultimately into the arms of his sister. Rigano’s paneled artwork ably conveys the unforgiving land- and seascapes the migrants traverse as well as the surreal passage of time as it switches from long days adrift and brief, violent encounters ashore. Readers may suspect a benevolent authorial hand at work in Ebo’s knowledge of [End Page 467] what to do in almost any heretofore unknown situation, in his ability to sing his way out of trouble, and in his lucky breaks at finding his brother in Africa and his sister in Europe, but most will agree that luck plays a significant role in determining who reaches shore alive. A map, a note from the creators, and a brief black and white interview with Helen, a refugee who actually survived a similar journey, will be included in the bound book. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer

Reviewed by: Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer John J. Miller Hendrik Meijer, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 448 pp. $35. In Michigan, the reminders of him are everywhere: His bespectacled statue stands at a downtown hub in Grand Rapids; his name emblazons a couple of elementary schools as well as an Oakland University dorm in metro Detroit; and a state historical marker commemorates his role in the birth of the UN and NATO, near the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Yet now Arthur Vandenberg may have his most enduring monument of all, in the form of an excellent biography by Hendrik Meijer. The Man in the Middle of the American Century is a fitting title. A leading senator of his time, Vandenberg (1884–1951) was a legislative middleman who cut deals with presidents and colleagues. He was a middle-of-the-road Republican who balanced his own conservative impulses with the progressive imperatives of his time. Close to the twentieth century's midpoint, he demonstrated the ability to change his mind and made a lasting mark in [End Page 111] foreign policy. Meijer sums up his legacy with appealing concision: "Harry Truman was in trouble without him." As a boy, Vandenberg got into his own bit of trouble because of Th eodore Roosevelt. In 1900, when Vandenberg was 16, the vice-presidential candidate, a fellow Dutchman, visited Grand Rapids on a campaign stop. A curious Vandenberg slipped away from his job at a biscuit factory to have a look. When he returned, his boss fired him for truancy. The next day, this apparent misfortune became a lucky break because Vandenberg secured a job as a writer at the Grand Rapids Herald, the city's morning newspaper. From this position, he began his long climb. He took a big step in 1906, when he was just shy of twenty-two years of age. The Herald's editor died suddenly, and its owner turned to his bright young writer. Vandenberg had earned a reputation for productivity as well as verbosity: "No one was better at bulking up a story with five-dollar words," writes Meijer. As Vandenberg matured, he never lost his willingness to work hard or his penchant for pomposity, but he also became a "gift ed phrasemaker." He may have popularized the term "fiddle-faddle," meaning "nonsense." Both Warren Harding and Henry Cabot Lodge sought his advice and borrowed his lines—a reminder that regional newspaper editorialists once enjoyed much more influence than they do today. Vandenberg's prominence as a journalist, in fact, led to his appointment to the Senate in the spring of 1928. He remained a senator until his death twenty-three years later. A colleague once described him as "the only Senator who can strut sitting down." Driven by the mix of ambition and insecurity that propels so many careers, then and now, Vandenberg engaged in the day's disputes over congressional reapportionment and tariffs, mainly hewing to GOP positions. Yet he also broke with President Herbert Hoover, a fellow Republican, over the Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a segregationist from North Carolina. Vandenberg cast a decisive vote against Parker, who became the only potential justice formally rejected by the Senate during the seventy-five-year period from 1894 to 1969. Vandenberg clashed more often with Hoover's Democratic successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he referred to as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Park." During the early days of the New Deal, the Michigander pushed for the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which Roosevelt initially opposed. For the most part, though, Vandenberg was a fiscal conservative who wanted to keep government spending in check. The [End Page 112] New Deal, he quipped, had become the "New Ordeal." He went on to block a White House scheme to build a ship canal across Florida's peninsula in the kind of negative achievement that historians often overlook. Roosevelt became so wary of his rival that he ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to open an office in Grand Rapids and, in Meijer's...

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy

charme propre” (266). Que diraient ces voyageurs s’ils revenaient aujourd’hui et voyaient les gratte-ciel qui ont remplacé les tentes et les puits de pétrole qui occupent le chimérique désert? Auburn University (AL) Samia I. Spencer Murphy, Libby. The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-300-21751-3. Pp. 279. Were the countless French infantrymen who after summer 1914 marched off to war along flag-lined thoroughfares so many consenting victims resigned to the patriotic necessity of bloodshed? Seconding historian Leonard Smith who questions the Great War metanarrative as a tragedy of victimization, Libby Murphy restores to consciousness a neglected constant of wartime experience: even as they obeyed orders, ordinary soldiers were overwhelmingly concerned with saving their hide. Rather than epic or elegy, it was the picaresque mode—concretized by the haphazard wanderings of LouisFerdinand Céline’s Bardamu, a morally pliant being if ever there was one—that best exemplified the improvisational, come-what-may attitude of the French foot soldier portrayed in the literary cultures of the day. Unrivaled in his mastery of le système D and always seeking a lucky break, the Gallic picaro-in-arms comes across in Murphy’s generous account as an irreverent trickster whose independence of thought and, on occasion, of action places him at odds with his imagined German counterparts, strictly beholden to military authority, or to the phlegmatic Britons who sheepishly “muddle through” the war. But it is those armchair patriots à la Maurice Barrès who attracted the most biting criticism: as tenacious as a trench rat himself, le poilu saw through hypocrisy and refused to accept shirkers’ incessant propagandizing, or bourrage de crâne. Building on an impressive command of Great War historiography from Jean Norton Cru’s Témoins (1929) to Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Murphy roundly takes issue with literary critic Evelyn Cobley (and presumably Pierre Schoentjes, author of Fictions de la Grande Guerre [2009]) who solemnly cast the foot soldier as brutalized victim. Laughter—given full literary expression through satire— was inseparable from the titular French “art of survival.” Eight chapters place in dialogue literary and journalistic texts from Le Crapouillot to Le Canard enchaîné, dime novels, illustrated caricatures, and film (released in France in 1919 as Charlot soldat, Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms is a lesson in picaresque resourcefulness). This eclecticism has the merit of desacralizing the Great War literary corpus: satirist Georges de La Fouchardière’s serialized Le bouif and Léon Werth’s messily episodic Clavel soldat receive more generous airings than do Henri Barbusse’s canonical Le feu or Céline’s début novel. Murphy draws apposite comparisons with British, German, and Czech sources; thus Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill drawings stand alongside Francisque Poulbot’s depictions of Montmartre street children giddily playing war. At stake is 208 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 209 how in the face of senseless violence the picaresque pragmatics of “getting by” pervaded the Great War literary and pictorial imaginary, and how texts refashioned an erstwhile Spanish narrative mode known for its blend of epic “adventure time” and routine “everyday time” (19) and for its peripatetic working-class or peasant protagonist, who encounters an array of human types while remaining a non-entity or“everyman”(24). Accessible and witty, this exploration of French cultural memory does much to refocus our understanding of la guerre de 14–18 by retrieving the nimble-spirited ingenuity that sustained French society until 1930, when pessimistic narratives of heroic victimization displaced it. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Pfaff, Françoise. Nouveaux entretiens avec Maryse Condé: écrivain et témoin de son temps. Paris: Karthala, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8111-1707-8. Pp. 200. Françoise Pfaff’s 1993 Entretiens avec Maryse Condé introduced the author to the public at a crucial time in her career and presented an exploration of the relationship between Condé’s life and her work as writer, academic and activist. Nouveaux entretiens updates readers on Condé’s trajectory since then, as she reflects on events that have transformed the world she engages in her work and...