A chaotic, irreverent testimonial ideal for frustrated progressives in this turbulent political moment.
A raucous fusion of memoir and action guide by a founding member of Vladimir Putin’s least favorite band, Pussy Riot.
In her debut, Tolokonnikova writes with an uncompromising mixture of fervor and humor, reflecting on her own hardscrabble life and the artistic development of her beloved band of provocateurs, who gained notoriety for critiques of post-communist Russia’s descent into an authoritarian oligarchy, culminating in the band’s 2012 prison sentence. As musician Kim Gordon says in her afterword, the book “is serious but has the playful feel of a Mission Impossible show.” Still, Tolokonnikova establishes high stakes, noting that “prison terms for political activists are seen as normal in public consciousness. When nightmares happen every day, people stop reacting to them.” The book has a sprawling yet regimented structure. While each chapter focuses on a precept for direct action as related to the Pussy Riot ethos—e.g., “Take Back the Joy” and “Make Your Government Shit Its Pants”—each also contains the author’s reflections on her formative experiences and readings of other thinkers and activists from whom she drew strength, especially during her unpleasant experiences as a prisoner following an unauthorized concert in the Russian Orthodox Church’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. She notes that their “punk prayer” and subsequent prosecution “exposed the brutal and cruel side of the government, but we didn’t do anything illegal. It’s not illegal to sing and say what you think.” Her stay in prison only amplified her rebellious determination, since she felt it linked her to mass incarceration and other political prisoners worldwide. In each chapter, the author urges readers to take concrete steps toward their own resistance. Though the writing can be abstruse—“we’re more than atoms, separated and frightened by TV and mutual distrust”—the book follows its own inner logic, code-switching between political idealism and gritty, sensory experience, seeding appeal for millennial readers.
A chaotic, irreverent testimonial ideal for frustrated progressives in this turbulent political moment.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-274158-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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