Joanna Scutts

Joanna Scutts is a writer based in New York and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, The New Yorker online, The Nation, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She is currently at work on a cultural history of feminism and self-help in the 1930s.

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Zero Hour

By Joanna Scutts

In The Burning of the World, his recently discovered memoir of the first few weeks of World War I, the Hungarian artist, officer, and man about town Béla Zombory-Moldován writes frequently about his attachment to his watch. When he’s wounded in the confusion of battle in the forests of Galicia, he finds the watch unscathed during an agonizing evacuation of the area, and exalts the survival of “my trusty companion, sharer of my fate, the comrade that connected me to my former life.” More