A smart, droll essay collection that is all over the map but focused by Crosley’s consistently sharp eye.
The latest collection from the Manhattan-based essayist suggests she can write engagingly about nearly anything.
A decade after establishing herself with her bestselling debut, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, Crosley (The Clasp, 2015, etc.) now finds herself addressing concerns and issues bordering on middle age, and she doesn’t like it. An early example of how many thematic levels she builds into an essay comes with “Outside Voices,” which seems, early on, to be about living in proximity to others, and then, more specifically, about “living on the most densely populated slip of land in America.” A lesser essayist would mine this for all it’s worth, but for Crosley, this is merely context for what comes to obsess her—the teenage boy next door and the family that entitles him to disturb the author’s personal space with his noisy outdoor social life. What really bothers her about him is his youth, which shows her how old she has become. So while the essay addresses the challenges and annoyances of overcrowded Manhattan, to the voyeuristic delight of readers who haven’t chosen to live there, it goes deeper into the universal ambivalence of realizing that you are no longer young and must seek out some type of second act as 40 approaches. As is typical in such collections, some essays are more ambitious and fully realized than others, but all work on multiple levels and all are sharply written, as Crosley continues to extend her impressive range. A writer writing about the writing life would not seem promising until she stumbles into a coven of pot-growing swingers who take the essay in an entirely different direction. An appearance on the canceled Gossip Girl might seem dated if it weren’t so perceptive on various levels of celebrity and the stereotypes that public figures adopt. The author’s closing essay on preserving her eggs is a marvel of ambivalence on ticking clocks and motherhood.
A smart, droll essay collection that is all over the map but focused by Crosley’s consistently sharp eye.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27984-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
