RaveThe AtlanticThrough observation and analysis that feel nearly anthropological in their detail, Ernaux argues that our shopping habits are determined not by personal choices, but by factors that are frequently outside our control ... Ernaux’s departure from the intensely intimate relationships that are the focus of much of her previous work might feel unorthodox at first. But as her gloomy portrait of the big-box store begins to form, it becomes clear that this book isn’t so different from her others: Her interest lies less in the store itself than in the way it serves as a site for interpersonal interactions ... What makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux’s language. This is not to be confused with sensuality—which the author is renowned for—but is rather the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument this slim work makes.
Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
PositiveArt in AmericaWith race-centered projects such as this, it’s often difficult to parse how ideas and images might affect the uninitiated, and whether their reading experience is tinged with voyeurism. But to a Black person (or at least this Black person), the feeling of being seen is all-consuming ... the moments that jump out—the only constant in this wealth of pluralism—are the instances of Black camaraderie ... In other places, charmingly low-res photographs emphasize the stakes of letting Black people exist as themselves ... If the Black inclination continues trending toward autonomy, and creating a space for the community to properly frame its creations, then the future looks bright, indeed.
Malgorzata Szejnert
RaveThe Nation...a new history of the island that covers the years 1774 (when Samuel Ellis, a merchant in colonial New York and the island’s namesake, bought it) to 2003 (when current members of the Leni Lenape tribe, who were pressured into “selling” the island to the Dutch West India Company in 1630, were allowed to exhume the remains of their ancestors)—works this way. She provides a plethora of raw data, including nationality quotas, how many people arrived on ships, the date when commissioners left their post—but her primary mode of storytelling is encouraging her audience to read between the lines, and her book does much in the service of contextualizing immigration to the US as fraught with discriminatory snap judgments on the merits of arriving individuals’ human value, rather than a triumphant articulation of American values, with a welcome mat in New York harbor.
Don Delillo
PositiveThe Boston GlobeIt’s tempting to view The Silence as reflective of the COVID-19 era, but it’d be wrong. Martin suggests the Chinese are responsible, but that has been a xenophobic obsession well before the winter of 2020 (According to Scribner, the novel was completed weeks before the pandemic hit.) In spite of its short length, the novel gets at something deeper and, in its emphasis on where individuals choose to direct their attention, something more quintessentially American. If you were magically freed from all your digital obligations, how would you occupy yourself? If you had the option, would you choose it?
Claudia Rankine
Rave4Columns... necessary and maddening. As anyone who has read her would expect, screenshots, tweets, historic civil-rights photos, demographic charts, and many other types of images are strategically interspersed throughout the text. What sets this book apart from her past work, though, is its overwhelming emphasis on straight prose instead of poetics ... What dominates these pages is Rankine’s personal narrative, smeared with America’s mess—leaving scant room for the stanza-like spacing that normally governs her pace. Her deployment of images that serve both as symbols and pieces of evidence is left to handle most of the dramatic tension, with an assist from real-time fact-checking. Situated next to many passages throughout the book are red dots that direct the reader to notes on the opposite side of the page. Often, the notes take on the structure of Hemingway’s iceberg—a slither of clean prose under which lies a massive body of feelings. What we are left with is the exhaustion of having to carry around reams of data in order to prove that racism still exists ... It’s not that Rankine doesn’t have an opinion about what individuals should do regarding their racism, just that she is more interested in showing what that racism looks like. All she is willing to propose is that people have difficult discussions, which is so deflating, yet so smack-your-forehead obvious, that one wonders whether the book will survive in the hands of anyone besides readers who already recognize themselves in those discussions ... Comfort, when so much in our vantage is in shambles, seems a luxury that should collectively be left on the shelf until civilization has worked hard enough to afford it. Which makes a strong case for Just Us as not only the most comprehensive articulation of the racial imaginary Rankine has ever put on paper, but as her magnum opus.
Danez Smith
Rave4Columns...by hiding the real name of the book, Smith only makes it available to those who take the time to read it. If the poetry were less earnest, this could come off as a gag—just another conceptual stunt. But the writer’s commitment to making black life visible while simultaneously expanding blackness’s scope when people are looking imbues this title with a different weight ... In its plainspoken yet voluminous vocabulary, its full-scale embrace of the body, and its ecstatic rendering of everyday life, Smith’s distinctive song of the self inevitably recalls Whitman ... Smith’s writing presents an identity tempered by a society that is slow to administer acceptance. Smith is a poet of profound abundance and empathy, and in this collection the moments that stay with you the longest are the ones that reflect on abandoning the socialization of a prolifically cruel world.
Mitchell S. Jackson
RaveBooklist\"Product-of-my-environment stories are common; beyond his candid self-portrayal as a willing-but-reluctant participant, what makes Jackson’s take on this theme so compelling is his inquisitive and unflinching investigation of the conditions that shaped him.\
Mitchell S. Jackson
RaveBookforumMitchell S. Jackson’s startling and inventive Survival Math ... is technically a memoir, [but] such a designation feels too narrow to encompass the bracing people’s history it delivers ... Moving back and forth through time, combining interviews of his subjects with first-person accounts from his own memory, Jackson’s book achieves the goal of taxonomizing the environment he grew up in ... By placing his own story within a longer historical lineage, Jackson has gone to great effort crafting a universal black narrative ... What differentiates Survival Math from that most common and banal of black narratives—the perseverance chronicle—is that Jackson doesn’t present himself as apart. He’s a willing-but-reluctant participant rather than a victim ... perhaps the most compelling cadre of voices may be the \'Survivor Files\' ... Jackson situates these accounts in second-person, the you’s accumulating, then refracting in exhilarating and inquisitive ways. The form reads as a call for eradicating barriers, and asks for a degree of empathy rarely experienced, one that encompasses an entire humanity—flaws and all.
Preston Lauterbach
PositiveBooklistWhen it was reported in 2010 that famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers was an FBI informant, friends and supporters still living may have thought the worst of him as a traitor whose information about the so-called agitators led to intimidation and far worse. By combining a wide-ranging context with narrative intensity, Lauterbach...hopes to correct the record. Eschewing a clean biographical arc, he instead parses the sociopolitical circumstances ... With previously unpublished photographs taken by Withers, Lauterbach provides a fresh, balanced, and provocative exploration of the photographer’s life and controversial choices.
