PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMcCann’s approach is at times bewilderingly dense and literary. While he does an admirable job teasing out and examining the various cultural mythologies and personal fantasies that constitute the worldviews of the occupiers...McCann often veers off into sometimes extraneous, sometimes downright strange philosophizing ... Moments like these might have been better left threaded within McCann’s own struggle to make sense of this story. But this is also part of the compelling character of McCann’s project. Readers are witness to his process. Shadowlands is in no small way a documentation of a curious poet learning about, observing, and stretching to make sense of his subject ... effects an entertaining, sweeping tone, developing cinematically as a colorful latticework of characters are introduced, documented, and pored over. There is no shortage of fascination in this story ... Of the many angles McCann takes over the course of Shadowlands, perhaps the most compelling is when he flirts with a visual culture approach to the story, via almost bizarrely in-depth descriptions of these YouTube videos ... Ultimately, McCann seems to say, over the course of 400 or so pages, essentially: \'This is complicated.\'
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksLess a traditional history than a theory of American violence ... And while Loaded boasts neither the sweeping narrative mastery of [An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States]nor the concision of [All the Real Indians Died Off], her thesis here is certainly as compelling as — and perhaps even more shattering than — any she has proposed in previous works ... Even for gun control advocates and liberals leery of militarized police, the full depth of this idea that guns are fundamentally tools of racism may be uncomfortable to confront. But it is that depth and discomfort that sets Loaded apart from the near constant and often dead-ended discussions about gun violence in the United States. As is the case with much of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work, Loaded demands of its readers that history be seen as a continuum to which the present belongs ... anyone at all really wants to \'get to the root causes of gun violence in America,\' they will need to start by coming to terms with even a fraction of what Loaded proposes. That is to say, perhaps it isn’t as simple as asking about the root causes of gun violence in America. Perhaps it’s a matter of considering gun violence as one of the root causes of America.
Nick Estes
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksNick Estes’s Our History Is the Future is an unflagging contribution to postcolonial recordkeeping ... Our History Is the Future makes an incisive case for the consideration of modern police violence as tied to the U.S. imperial project ... Nick Estes does not imagine—nor stretch to create—connections; he does not work in ways that are particularly clever or poetic, although the book is peppered with moments of deeply felt passion for and participation in the subject. In those moments, the text hums with a kind of emotional resonance ... we are made to see clearly, through Estes’s work, the ways in which supremacy systems protect and perpetuate themselves ... ne might read a sort of cynicism in Estes’s insistence that \'our history is the future.\' The book is, after all, a history of Indigenous struggle to survive. But perhaps, even if read as a prediction of continued struggle, it is still more triumphant than cynical.
