The author of American Psycho (1991) and a half-dozen other novels returns with a series of thematically related essays.
Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms, 2010, etc.)—who also has a podcast to which he often refers and who has also worked extensively on various film and TV projects—will not endear himself to those who are politically left-leaning. Repeatedly, he assails liberals for failing to accept the election of Donald Trump—and for helping to make everyone hysterical about having to see, read, and think about things we don’t agree with. The left, he writes near the end, has become “a rage machine.” Ellis’ text also displays aspects of memoir: One piece deals with his early (and continuing) fondness for films, which his father cultivated by taking him, even at a young age, to some very “adult” movies. These memories lead him to discuss Richard Gere, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Tom Cruise. American Psycho is also a leitmotif: Ellis tells us about the conception and writing of the novel, lets us know that the brutality existed only in the imagination of his protagonist, and makes other comments about the film and the subsequent musical, which lost money. He slowly leads us, as well, into a discussion of his sexuality and his various relationships. Ultimately, though, his principal interest is in the fractured American culture, political and otherwise. He rails against college students who demand “trigger warnings”; blasts the traditional media; tells stories about the excessive reactions to his tweets; and celebrates some current cultural outcasts, including Charlie Sheen, Roseanne Barr, and Kanye West. He lashes out at certain writers while delivering praise to others—e.g., he admires Joan Didion and Jonathan Franzen.
Well-written pieces bubbling with attitude and self-confidence but, at times, as judgmental as those Ellis condemns.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65630-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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PROFILES
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism.
In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a “white supremacist country.” The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as “one of the most defining forces” in her life. Throughout the book, Oluo responds to questions that she has often been asked, and others that she wishes were asked, about racism “in our workplace, our government, our homes, and ourselves.” “Is it really about race?” she is asked by whites who insist that class is a greater source of oppression. “Is police brutality really about race?” “What is cultural appropriation?” and “What is the model minority myth?” Her sharp, no-nonsense answers include talking points for both blacks and whites. She explains, for example, “when somebody asks you to ‘check your privilege’ they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing.” She unpacks the complicated term “intersectionality”: the idea that social justice must consider “a myriad of identities—our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more—that inform our experiences in life.” She asks whites to realize that when people of color talk about systemic racism, “they are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you” and are asking that they be heard. After devoting most of the book to talking, Oluo finishes with a chapter on action and its urgency. Action includes pressing for reform in schools, unions, and local governments; boycotting businesses that exploit people of color; contributing money to social justice organizations; and, most of all, voting for candidates who make “diversity, inclusion and racial justice a priority.”
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-677-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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