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Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How a Book Can Change a Graduate's Life
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. For many people in their early 20s, graduating from college is both a significant milestone—perhaps the most important of their young life—and a rupture that leaves them utterly unmoored. (It has been this way for a long time; just ask Dustin Hoffman on that pool float.) A week ago, as the class of 2025 began heading into the world, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez wrote about times we find ourselves without direction, and the books that can help guide us out of the wilderness. She names seven that helped her through upheavals in her own life, and specifically calls out transitional moments such as weddings (or breakups), job changes, and, of course, graduations. First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: A provocative argument about what creates serial killers Yes I will read Ulysses yes ' A Father's Prayer,' a poem by Gioncarlo Valentine Fathers don't just protect—they prepare ' Weepers,' a short story by Peter Mendelsund My own college commencement ceremony took place some years ago this week. On paper, it was the perfect celebration: I donned my cap and gown, posed for my mother's Facebook pictures, and took an exciting phone call about a full-time job. But in reality, I wasn't even graduating that day: I'd been mailed my diploma the previous December and had spent the intervening six months underemployed and sick, subsisting on meals I was still learning how to cook and bottles of Two-Buck Chuck. Perhaps because my final college years coincided with the height of the #MeToo movement, I'd been reading a lot of work by female essayists and memoirists. I was looking for someone to distill and clarify what I was experiencing as a young woman, to help me move firmly into the category of 'adult' while taking stock of all the baggage I was still carrying from my teens. I bought Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts from a feminist bookstore in Atlanta. I got Mary Karr's Lit from a books-by-the-pound store in my college town, and devoured it. I read Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Margo Jefferson, and Joan Didion. But the book that most defined those months and years was Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Jamison's essay collection alternates between measured analysis and naked emotion. Across chapters, the author takes on different roles: a medical actor, a journalist investigating a dubious diagnosis, a tourist in Nicaragua, a theorist of female suffering. In self-aware prose, she deftly avoids the labels that too often entrap women who write about their life and their feelings—self-obsessed, hysterical, histrionic. But Jamison also understands how good it feels to be melodramatic, and how warranted it can be. There's a big, bloody heart inside her sentences, and its insistent beat won my allegiance immediately and forever. At the time, I felt fragile, like my shell might crack at any moment, and between Jamison's covers I found a writer who understood that sensation. The margins of my copy, I see now, are crammed with annotations marking moments of reflection and identification. They're also full of craft notes, breaking down how Jamison deploys a phrase or a pronoun, charting allusions and noting connections between her ideas and the ones I'd encountered while earning my degree. Her book was a guiding star, not just emotionally but also professionally: It reminded me why I wanted to write and edit, and why I cared about great prose in the first place. It encouraged me to make room for my many overwhelming feelings—and then to keep moving toward the life I have today. By Xochitl Gonzalez These titles are great tools for anyone trying to navigate new opportunities, new places, or new phases of life. What to Read Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey; The Night of the Gun, by David Carr; The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison; Lit, by Mary Karr; and The Basketball Diaries, by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precede the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. — Melissa Febos Out Next Week 📚 Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, by André Aciman 📚 The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley 📚 , by Rebecca Grant Your Weekend Read The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta By Matteo Wong Reorienting the internet and society around imperfect and relatively untested products is not the inevitable result of scientific and technological progress—it is an active choice Silicon Valley is making, every day. That future web is one in which most people and organizations depend on AI for most tasks. This would mean an internet in which every search, set of directions, dinner recommendation, event synopsis, voicemail summary, and email is a tiny bit suspect; in which digital services that essentially worked in the 2010s are just a little bit unreliable. And while minor inconveniences for individual users may be fine, even amusing, an AI bot taking incorrect notes during a doctor visit, or generating an incorrect treatment plan, is not.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Benefits of Refusing
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books section: Fast times and mean girls The real message behind Les Misérables How one animal divided Europe Seven books for people figuring out their next move The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, 'it made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: 'Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. What to Read When You're Ready to Say No By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. Read the full article. , by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen From our list: Five books that will redirect your attention 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Benefits of Refusing
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they 'gave it up,' Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it's more common to hear that they 'quit.' She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is 'to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one's hands for other holdings.' The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to 'all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,' she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, 'it made sense to keep the channel of one's heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.' Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else. At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the 'tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,' as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one's attention: 'Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.' Febos's book made me wonder what narrow portals I'm looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them. By Melissa Febos Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty. What to Read Untold Night and Day, by Bae Suah The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen Out Next Week 📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene 📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey 📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Your Weekend Read What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center By Megan Garber Little wonder that 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' [from Les Misérables ] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story's tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
When the Status Quo Doesn't Cut It
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Why are so many Americans so eager to find alternatives—political, medical, vocational—to the status quo? By many measures, the 9-to-5 workplace, the medical industry, and other mainstays of American life seem to have served the country's population very well: The United States has the world's largest economy, and its population is far healthier and wealthier than it was before World War II. Yet in 2023, North Americans spent an average of $5,800 each on 'wellness' treatments whose efficacy has not always been backed by research. One in 13 Americans have participated in multilevel marketing, even though research has shown that 99 percent of them lose money in the process, and 30 percent supported a Cabinet position for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the movement to 'make America healthy again,' who has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. This state of affairs has animated several stories in The Atlantic's books section over the past two weeks, and all of them identify the same basic answer: The status quo is no longer working. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books desk: A reality check for tech oligarchs The world that Wages for Housework wanted Five books that will redirect your attention 'I Remember': A poem by William H. McRaven As Adam M. Lowenstein wrote in his essay on Gardiner Harris's No More Tears, an exposé about the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson's persistent efforts to downplay the risks of some of its products, evidence that the health-care system puts profits first may have 'left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else.' Cases of pharmaceutical wrongdoing give a message like Kennedy's—that the medical industry is corrupt—an understandable appeal. This same message underlies the $6.3 trillion wellness industry, with its array of purported miracle cures. Sheila McClear, in an essay on Amy Larocca's new book, How to Be Well, wrote this week that 'Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives.' Those who can't find a therapist who takes insurance can instead buy a '$38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood,' for example, while the wealthy can enroll in boutique health services that make house calls. This deep distrust in American institutions—and the parade of disruptive entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of it—extends far beyond the medical arena. Last week, Lora Kelley wrote about Bridget Read's book Little Bosses Everywhere, a history of MLMs—companies that hire salespeople who earn commissions by signing up more salespeople. These businesses first proliferated during the Great Depression, and it felt like no coincidence to Kelley that they resurged online a few years ago during the 'Great Resignation,' when growing numbers of workers were laid off or quit out of frustration. Many modern MLMs, Kelley writes, 'promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market.' She summarizes Read's argument like so: 'MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure.' McClear, in her article, writes that the second Trump administration has opened the gates to medical skeptics. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, is the current nominee for surgeon general, and Kennedy now leads the Department of Health and Human Services. McClear notes that some of Kennedy's policy positions, such as curbs on microplastics, unhealthy foods, and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, could be productive reforms, and others, such as reducing access to vaccines and fluoride, feel like dubious solutions in search of a problem. It's not so hard to argue that the current state of the nation has left many people disappointed—in some cases, desperate for something that works. But this doesn't mean that any alternative is necessarily better. Some are proving to be demonstrably worse. The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze By Sheila McClear A new book reveals how health-care inequality fueled the spread of anti-science conspiracy theories. Read the full article. , by Denis Johnson Johnson's drama of the American frontier is barely a novel; the thin paperback can be started on a hot afternoon and finished by happy hour. Yet it has accrued a devoted following in the nearly 15 years since it was published, because it conjures a great expanse—the mythic West. Its main character, Robert Grainier, works as a contract laborer for the railroads running through Idaho and Washington State. Sweating and straining, he hauls down giant conifers in the region's old-growth forests. He feels a sweet freedom while riding over freshly laid rail, watching the wilderness blur by through a boxcar's slats. Train Dreams is not overly romantic about its time and place: In the first chapter, Grainier's boss orders him to throw a Chinese laborer off an unfinished bridge. A curse later seems to fall upon Grainier. He experiences God's cosmic vengeance, a cleansing fire racing across the dry landscape. Johnson has a cinematic style, lingering on images. But the novella barrels forward with the locomotion evoked in its title, until the end of Grainier's days, and the end of the Old West. Give it a few hours in June, and it may hold on to your imagination until August. — Ross Andersen From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide 📚 Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid 📚 Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, by Mark Kriegel 📚 Charlottesville: An American Story, by Deborah Baker The Talented Mr. Vance By George Packer J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America's social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump's first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
30-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
When the Status Quo Doesn't Cut It
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Why are so many Americans so eager to find alternatives—political, medical, vocational—to the status quo? By many measures, the 9-to-5 workplace, the medical industry, and other mainstays of American life seem to have served the country's population very well: The United States has the world's largest economy, and its population is far healthier and wealthier than it was before World War II. Yet in 2023, North Americans spent an average of $5,800 each on 'wellness' treatments whose efficacy has not always been backed by research. One in 13 Americans have participated in multilevel marketing, even though research has shown that 99 percent of them lose money in the process, and 30 percent supported a Cabinet position for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leader of the movement to 'make America healthy again,' who has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. This state of affairs has animated several stories in The Atlantic 's books section over the past two weeks, and all of them identify the same basic answer: The status quo is no longer working. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books desk: As Adam M. Lowenstein wrote in his essay on Gardiner Harris's No More Tears, an exposé about the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson's persistent efforts to downplay the risks of some of its products, evidence that the health-care system puts profits first may have 'left some people so disillusioned and distrustful that they were willing to try anything else.' Cases of pharmaceutical wrongdoing give a message like Kennedy's—that the medical industry is corrupt—an understandable appeal. This same message underlies the $6.3 trillion wellness industry, with its array of purported miracle cures. Sheila McClear, in an essay on Amy Larocca's new book, How to Be Well, wrote this week that 'Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives.' Those who can't find a therapist who takes insurance can instead buy a '$38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood,' for example, while the wealthy can enroll in boutique health services that make house calls. This deep distrust in American institutions—and the parade of disruptive entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of it—extends far beyond the medical arena. Last week, Lora Kelley wrote about Bridget Read's book Little Bosses Everywhere, a history of MLMs—companies that hire salespeople who earn commissions by signing up more salespeople. These businesses first proliferated during the Great Depression, and it felt like no coincidence to Kelley that they resurged online a few years ago during the ' Great R esignation,' when growing numbers of workers were laid off or quit out of frustration. Many modern MLMs, Kelley writes, 'promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market.' She summarizes Read's argument like so: 'MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure.' McClear, in her article, writes that the second Trump administration has opened the gates to medical skeptics. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, is the current nominee for surgeon general, and Kennedy now leads the Department of Health and Human Services. McClear notes that some of Kennedy's policy positions, such as curbs on microplastics, unhealthy foods, and unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies, could be productive reforms, and others, such as reducing access to vaccines and fluoride, feel like dubious solutions in search of a problem. It's not so hard to argue that the current state of the nation has left many people disappointed—in some cases, desperate for something that works. But this doesn't mean that any alternative is necessarily better. Some are proving to be demonstrably worse. The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze By Sheila McClear A new book reveals how health-care inequality fueled the spread of anti-science conspiracy theories. What to Read Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Johnson's drama of the American frontier is barely a novel; the thin paperback can be started on a hot afternoon and finished by happy hour. Yet it has accrued a devoted following in the nearly 15 years since it was published, because it conjures a great expanse—the mythic West. Its main character, Robert Grainier, works as a contract laborer for the railroads running through Idaho and Washington State. Sweating and straining, he hauls down giant conifers in the region's old-growth forests. He feels a sweet freedom while riding over freshly laid rail, watching the wilderness blur by through a boxcar's slats. Train Dreams is not overly romantic about its time and place: In the first chapter, Grainier's boss orders him to throw a Chinese laborer off an unfinished bridge. A curse later seems to fall upon Grainier. He experiences God's cosmic vengeance, a cleansing fire racing across the dry landscape. Johnson has a cinematic style, lingering on images. But the novella barrels forward with the locomotion evoked in its title, until the end of Grainier's days, and the end of the Old West. Give it a few hours in June, and it may hold on to your imagination until August. — Ross Andersen 📚 Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, by Mark Kriegel 📚 Charlottesville: An American Story, by Deborah Baker Your Weekend Read The Talented Mr. Vance By George Packer J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America's social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump's first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J. D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.
