Provocative and darkly humorous.
Cultural critic and essayist Kipnis explores how Covid-19 and the socio-economic turbulence of recent years have reshaped concepts of dating, love, sex, and interpersonal closeness.
For Kipnis, who has written multiple well-received books about love and sexuality, the pandemic has done far more than reorganize the way the world operates; it also “infect[ed] our relation to other people’s bodies.” In this witty four-essay collection, she explores how the pandemic, in tandem with such preexisting crises as political polarization, accelerating economic disparities, and racial and sexual injustice, has permanently altered intimate relationships. Like a “viral imp of the perverse,” Covid-19 contributed to massive loneliness throughout the world via lockdown scenarios and social distancing. In the U.S., writes Kipnis, “the flailing government response” only added to the anxiety about the “fatally divided nation” America had become under the “biohazard” that was the Trump administration. The virus also laid bare the grim reality that some in this country—e.g., the poor and people of color—were “more disposable than others.” In the realm of relationships, Kipnis quips that the pandemic became a kind of metaphor for what consciousness-raised heterosexual women had been feeling all over the world: that men began to feel “like germs.” The author’s own long-term relationship was suddenly exposed as a “neurotic pact” that verged on co-dependent. For millions of others, physical contact had become “a crisis.” A dearth of safe spaces in which to interact drove many—in particular, tech-savvy, undersexed young professionals—to seek connection online only to find themselves caught up in a chaotic, very public swirl of personal dramas. Fearless and sharply observed, this book suggests that future post-pandemic challenges will have less to do with its biological legacy to humanity and more to do with the impact of a virus on interpersonal closeness.
Provocative and darkly humorous.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31628-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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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