A thoughtful study, certainly relevant if occasionally one-noted.
Closely observed, somewhat repetitive collection of mostly previously published essays by the author of the award-winning How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (2009).
Chagrined about the treatment of Muslim Americans after 9/11 and still puzzling over even more strenuous anti-Muslim demonstrations since the election of President Barack Obama, Bayoumi (English/Brooklyn Coll.) probes the so-called “War on Terror culture,” which ascribes a malevolent aspect to all things Muslim. As he did in his previous work, observing the lives of young Arab-American men and women in his own town of Brooklyn, the author examines the stories of people targeted unfairly as suspicious aliens simply because of their ethnic background, beginning with the Syrian traders who flocked to the United States in the 19th century. Establishing thriving communities in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, exactly where the World Trade towers stood, the first Arab Muslims suffered the same fate under early exclusionary immigration laws as the Asians, although the courts decided in a number of significant cases—e.g., that of Ahmed Hassan in Detroit in 1942—whether Arabs were white or not and could be excluded from naturalization due to their religion. In a series of essays in which themes and motifs overlap and repeat, Bayoumi critiques the New York Police Department’s invasive surveillance of American Muslim communities (“Fear and Loathing of Islam”); the U.S. government’s program of “special registration” of nonimmigrant men from Muslim-majority countries, which prompted the author’s first book (“White with Rage”); how Arabs and Muslims are “racialized” and demonized as blacks were previously (“The Race Is On”); and how many films and TV shows reflect American culture’s bias and stereotypes about Muslims. Bayoumi sagely points out the reigning ignorance about Muslim culture and how the “right-wing lunacy” has largely co-opted “the direction of global politics” (“Men Behaving Badly”).
A thoughtful study, certainly relevant if occasionally one-noted.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3564-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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