RaveThe New York Review of BooksHorowitz does a masterful job of describing the public and private engineering projects that made possible real estate construction, oil exploration, and other forms of economic expansion in New Orleans during the twentieth century, building fortunes for a few while putting thousands in the path of the next big storm ... Humanists often overlook the importance of infrastructure when they write social history, but Horowitz vividly illustrates how it shapes life and land around it, in both planned and unplanned ways ... We see America as a failed state. But Horowitz’s analysis of the storm’s impact also contains surprises.
Naomi Klein
MixedThe New York Review of BooksAt first glance, On Fire is nowhere near as ambitious as Klein’s other books. After its rousing introduction, the book is a mishmash of short, uneven pieces on subjects ranging from suffocating wildfires on the West Coast to the 2015 papal encyclical on climate. It does not propose a master narrative to explain the current situation. It lacks the deep reporting that distinguishes her most influential work. It’s repetitive and unfairly dismissive of some genuinely difficult scientific and political questions that deserve more open debate ... Yet Klein is a talented polemicist, and On Fire is a powerful manifesto. Readers with a more scholarly disposition may be put off by her admonitions and instructions, but Klein isn’t trying to win over the seminar room or the swing voter. She wants to catalyze a movement ... What it will not do is persuade skeptics, including people who care about global warming but don’t share Klein’s politics, that a GND is politically feasible, given the vehement right-wing opposition to it as well as the enormous costs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic response and recovery. It offers no coherent strategy for overcoming partisan opposition to progressive environmental and economic policies, no likely pathways to the more just, sustainable world Klein wants to build.
Alex Kotlowitz
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Like Kotlowitz’s now classic 1991 book, There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, An American Summer forgoes analysis and instead probes the human damage that stems from exposure to violence. What he finds is important ... Kotlowitz, however, depicts the question of what causes urban crime to rise and fall as essentially unanswerable. \'Anyone who tells you they know is lying.\' This is a curious position, especially given the trend (hardly mentioned in An American Summer) that criminologists consider the most important fact about urban violence in recent decades: Most American cities have experienced far less of it than anyone predicted, and national experts feel more confident than ever about what works ... President Trump, who called Chicago a \'war zone\' and threatened to send in the National Guard, and Spike Lee, who named his 2015 film Chi-Raq, have helped make Chicago the national symbol of murderous violence. Kotlowitz, despite good intentions, has reinforced this view ... An American Summer is a powerful indictment of a city and a nation that have failed to protect their most vulnerable residents, or to register the depth of their pain. It is also a case study in the constraints of a purely narrative approach to the problems of inequality and social suffering.\
