RaveBookforumGlück elaborates a particular and surprising structure of feeling: abundance where one might have expected absence. Meditating on Ed’s death and life, Glück makes death abundant in his own thoughts and actions, and works grief richly into his sentence.
Jarrod Shanahan
RaveThe NationShanahan’s new book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, traces in detail the competing political agendas that produced Rikers, following the history of the city’s jails from the 1950s up through the end of Ed Koch’s mayoral administration...Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing question—why did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States?—by asking, and answering, several others...Captives in that sense is more than a history of Rikers: It chronicles the transformations of finance, industry, race relations, and political consciousness that made the jail complex possible in the first place...Shanahan documents the tumultuous second half of the 20th century in New York City—the fading glow of the New Deal; the rise of Black Power and the New Left; the near-total exit of the city’s manufacturing capital, and the subsequent capture of the political apparatus by the banking and real estate sector; the imposition of austerity policies following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s—from the standpoint of the city’s jails, as well as the people warehoused within and fighting to get out of them.
Andrea Long Chu
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksChu articulates something less than an argument and more than an attitude. If what counts is doubling down on what you say, no matter if you really believe it in the end, then the point of saying it becomes convincing someone that you really feel how you feel. Your argument is a front for your tone. Females therefore doesn’t so much present a theory about gender as an affective stance toward it, one derived from a politics but without political claims per se — at least, not claims that, in the last instance, the author is really prepared to defend the truth of ... It’s hard to reconcile any of these arguments with a politics in which life and the means for living it — for whom, by whom, and at whose expense — are actually at stake ... Sifting through someone else’s political nihilism is one challenge; doing so when the writer admits she isn’t speaking in good faith is another. Chu’s book is littered with indefensible syntagms, sentences designed for maximum shock value ... Chu’s flippant sentences dismiss any conceptual encounter with the actual consequences of what she’s saying ... the anti-trans theorist Janice Raymond and the anti-sex work feminist Catharine MacKinnon appear in Females with approving citations ... It’s not clear what Females achieves in the warmed-over theoretical truisms of a prior cultural moment, beyond the \'projection\' that it promises, or a scandalized reaction to the comedic bit. And the problem with the bit — the problem for comedy in general, a genre that Chu more than once expresses an affinity for — is that its theses have conceptual consequences and social implications, whether or not, in the last instance, Chu really means what she says.
