Intriguing and often entertaining reading on a phenomenon that seems timeless.
A brief historical excavation of bunkers and in-depth exploration of their present-day use, when they “are built not so much in response to one single imminent catastrophe, but out of a more general sense of disquiet.”
For millennia, humans have been digging underground for shelter and to avoid disasters, but cultural geographer Garrett is primarily interested in the bunkers built by militias, survivalists, and preppers. This is the “hardened architecture” of dread, an expression of our 21st-century anxieties and insecurities, “the dominant affect of our era.” From his geographic/ethnographic perspective, Garrett is a capable writer with a crisp, detailed, visual quality to his work, and he brings a gratifying participant approach to this investigation. The author intended to meet the preppers to get a sense of what made them tick (paranoia, practicality, or a mixture of both?), and while he was able to take the measure of some, many were too secretive to reveal too much. Garrett discovered that preppers are motivated by a number of forces, from the scientific to the spiritual. Appalled by a government that has abandoned its responsibility to protect its citizens and a socio-economic system that has fostered alienation and an increased need for self-defense, they dread the prospect of a desperate, voracious human population fighting over dwindling resources. Most interesting are the author’s accounts of his visits to a variety of bunker complexes, including DIY homestead operations, abandoned ICBM silos, and Australian fire bunkers, “oxygen-filled cocoons that look remarkably similar to the nuclear shelters that Americans built in a panic during the first doom boom in the early years of the Cold War.” Garrett finds that many complexes are little more than a combination of wishful thinking and unexecuted plans, and he also avers that communities are crucial, transitions inevitable, and some prepping highly practical. Regarding the last, the author’s “Acronym and Argot Glossary” is helpful for readers unfamiliar with the lingo.
Intriguing and often entertaining reading on a phenomenon that seems timeless.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8855-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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