A disquieting, deeply thoughtful cultural critique.
Wide-ranging, erudite, and impassioned essays examine whiteness and literature.
Whiting Award winner Row (English/Coll. of New Jersey; Your Face in Mine, 2014, etc.) melds memoir, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection in seven essays that examine how whiteness is imagined and represented in “novels, short stories, films [and] plays.” As a white writer with a complicated racial identity and father to two multiracial children, Row is troubled by the way fiction “reflects and sustains” notions of whiteness as “normal, neutral, and central.” How do fiction writers, even unconsciously, perpetuate racism? Is it possible for fiction to contribute to a process of reconciliation and reparation? Reparative writing asks writers “to bring their own sadness or their own bodies into play when writing about race or racism,” including feelings of “paralysis, isolation, or alienation.” In his view, the white American literary community—which he reveals by examining a prodigious number of writers, scholars, and critics—rather than struggling to express these deep-seated feelings, takes on “postures of avoidance and denial.” This avoidance, Row asserts, is a form of “white flight,” a term usually associated with “abandonment of the ideals of integration” by whites fleeing urban African American, Latinx, or immigrant communities to suburban homes surrounded by “enormous lawns” that serve as “a buffer or barrier.” Applied to writing, “white flight” encapsulates “the desire not to have one’s visual field constantly invaded by inconveniently different faces—relationships that are fraught, unfixed, capable of producing equal measures of helplessness and guilt.” Row’s urgent desire to confront questions of race is compelled in part by his own background, which he shares in engrossing autobiographical vignettes. On one side of his family, his ancestors were among the first white settlers on land forcibly taken from the Lakota; on the other were immigrants from the racially mixed Azores. But his concern transcends his own background: Is it possible, he wonders, for white writers ever to escape “the horror of performing within the family romance of whiteness”? Though the lit-crit language may turn off some readers, this is a significant contribution to the cultural landscape.
A disquieting, deeply thoughtful cultural critique.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55597-832-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
A history, published in Britain shortly after the author wrote it in 1937, of the few months surrounding the Barcelona Telephone Exchange riots and what the writer determines as the Communist betrayal of all of Spain's anti-fascist forces. The crux of Orwell's writing is to show the ridiculous misrepresentations of the actual happenings in Barcelona and on the front and their meaning for the rest of Spain. The Communists were joined with the Government. Another anti-fascist faction was the P.O.U.M. or anarchist militia. They were closely allied with socialist worker movements, ready to build up a workers' revolution. In the beginning when issues were but hazily defined, Orwell joined the P.O.U.M. and fought with them- at the front. The Communists, considering anarchist-socialist revolutionary policies as presumptive, sought successfully to purge the P.O.U.M. and rendered them through messy journalism, coercive police methods, withdrawal of arms, false reports- as Trotskyists, pro-Franco, anything but the potent patriotic force they were. Thus republican Spain lost a power that could have helped beat Franco. Orwell's report is as exciting as it is meditative. With his quiet exactitude the midnight skirmishes, the political issues, and the utter futility of war come clearly into focus. Perhaps not a book to create sensation in a day when much of what happened at Barcelona has been realized, but one enlightening in terms of showing the war way toward mutual understanding and fair play.
Pub Date: May 15, 1952
ISBN: 1849025975
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1952
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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