A hit-or-miss ramble in praise of giving time to wasting time.
A glancing meditation on the value of spending idle time with friends, family, and strangers.
“Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others,” writes Liming, a professor of literature, media, and writing. The “daring” bit seems a little overstated. Most people, apart from those in isolation and agoraphobes, seem not to have trouble finding ways to lounge around with a clutch of fellow lollygaggers watching a ball game or arguing over the ways of the world. Liming means something more rarefied, with hanging out—not doing much—as an act of resistance against a late-stage capitalist regime that demands that we all be available to work all the time. Hanging out, she writes, “marks the boundaries of a sanctuary space that exists at a remove from the pressures of market-driven competition.” That’s all well and good, and capable of being said without much buttressing. Still, the author consistently calls in the cavalry, from Emerson to Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin. Where the appeal to authority is apposite, it’s often qualified: “[M.F.K.] Fisher is, so far as I am concerned, one of the preeminent twentieth-century voices not just on the subject of eating but on eating socially.” The hedging clause is no more necessary than Liming’s rendering of a hiking trip as “the work of collective arrival,” a formulation both arid and abstract. The author deserves praise for honesty, however, in admitting that the conferences so beloved of academics are really “fundamentally about seizing the opportunity to hang out.” Liming is at her best when she considers in-person lounging against the online hanging out that younger people seem increasingly to prefer and which will change the face of socializing: After all, you can’t catch pandemic diseases over the internet, and gathering in groups is a prerequisite condition for mass shootings.
A hit-or-miss ramble in praise of giving time to wasting time.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68589-005-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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