PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksWith this expertise and prior research, Puglionesi makes a perfect guide through the strange myths, characters, and environments that best reflect the insidious exploitation inseparable from American dominion ... One of the highlights of In Whose Ruins is Puglionesi’s attention to the complicated marriage between Bamewawagehikaquay, or Jane Johnston, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, today remembered for chronicling many Native American folktales, though, as we know now, rather inaccuratel...Puglionesi tells their story, which is really more the tale of Johnston, in the most deft writing in the book. The laser-sharp historical focus on this marriage persuades the audience of her thesis more clearly than some of the more conceptual and thus, more removed, passages that follow ... we follow Puglionessi’s thesis to some unnatural avenues ... Puglionesi’s previous work gives her unquestionable expertise on this subject matter, but at times there is perhaps too much credence given to the idea that these oilmen truly believed in these stories of divine intervention and inspiration ... to take up Puglionesi’s convincing and illuminating reading of American history and land, it seems to be inevitable that a public reckoning with these ghosts, real or not, is necessary. If this accounting did come to pass, it could herald the beginning of an American without these ghosts, where the ugly histories are not concealed, but brought out into the sun.
Hari Kunzru
PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books... exceedingly clever in feeding the reader this slow detachment, and mimics almost exactly how it feels to be taken over by a powerful, intoxicating, and dangerous belief ... Kunzru’s insistence on an unnamed narrator, his deliberate focus on how a privileged, well-educated man gradually grows estranged from his grip on reality, all adds up to a convincing portrait of what it looks like to be \'redpilled,\' a phenomenon that we increasingly have to reckon with. In fact, the narrator represents a critique of many well-intentioned liberals who attempt to understand the Far Right in order to combat them, but never end up moving beyond the stage of obsessive research ... a terrific, vital portrayal, but it seems to be almost outdated. This is not to knock Red Pill. It’s a new development, and one that directly counters prior arguments of mere solidarity as the antidote to conspiracy theories. Even as red pill pushers prey on the most alone and vulnerable, they offer a sense of security and belonging, and their buyers have only swelled in number since Trump’s victory ... Being redpilled in 2020 doesn’t look like accepting a cold, empty world where your subjective life is meaningless, which is what it looks like in Kunzru’s novel, in the narrator’s inability to define the \'lyric l\' and his descent into the rabbit hole. Now it means accepting and embracing a completely fictional world, with the knowledge that there is a larger We that you belong to ... a much-needed literary examination of the red pill phenomenon, especially in its demonstration of how it hooks those who should know better. The question now becomes what do we do when those addicted to the drug no longer feel isolated, and see the world only in terms of \'us versus them.\' Kunzru’s novel gives us a means to examine how an individual can lose themselves in a well-executed mind game. It’s now up to us to apply it to a post-2016 world to see if we can’t pull some people out, or to fight it as best we can. As Anton tells the narrator, \'the only way out is through.\'
