Haunting ... Witt...writes with such cool precision that it’s hard to imagine her fully losing herself in sentimental projects, even with chemical assistance ... As important as Andrew was for her, exactly what it was that made him such an enthralling presence is never quite conveyed ... It’s a testament to Witt’s skills as a writer that this book is enhanced, and not diminished, by her refusal to reconcile such contradictions.
Her journey of self-discovery dovetailed with an existential crisis about her career in journalism, which earned her increasing stability and prestige but fell far short of changing the world. Undergirding this professional dilemma, though, was a more relatable concern, which she renders in exacting and mournful prose: the evergreen search for a satisfying life in an unfeeling, chaotic country ... Witt’s directness and sincerity are disarming.
he attempts to capture, through memoir, sociology, and a kind of club ethnography, the many meanings and embodied states of a night out, while also situating them in an evolving subculture ... Making clubbing the subject of literary journalism is no easy task: It can be fraught and self-indulgent, a cool-kid version of the journalist who writes a memoir about an erstwhile hobby ... Not just a memoir of clubbing, but a critical and cultural history of a time and place worthy of its own periodization ... Witt’s descriptions are compelling. Her enthusiasm for capturing the experience is also grounded in her sociological and historical observations on dance music ... Even the most personal passages here can end up being the most arresting.
Whether she succeeds in convincing you will depend on how close you are to this world; the book does not threaten the insecure general-interest reader by making its author seem too cool, but those who know their way around a club bathroom stall will want something a little stronger ... Even spaces where truly crazy stuff happens are, in Health and Safety, denuded of much narrative interest in favor of the party line that they produce a subcultural community organized not just around hedonism but 'the music, too' ... The book offers little new insight about American politics or about Witt’s reporting on it at the time for the New Yorker ... Witt effectively historicizes the return of the rave in the United States, but her desire to do so confuses me; she doesn’t seem to like writing more than she does partying ... The most upsetting thing about this book is not the large quantities of drugs Witt takes, or the possibly deleterious effects they have on her and her loved ones, or even the prematurely elegiac denialism that allows her to chalk it all up to a righteous loathing of capitalism. It’s that such an eloquent and perceptive writer seems to be genuinely more cynical about writing itself than she is about getting high with people who work in tech.
An entertaining, provocative, first-person reported book about the subcultures surrounding a recreational activity ... A book concerned with how people express their political frustration ... Does not attempt to define stability, health, or safety. Rather the book is about striving for all those states of being in a tumultuous, difficult, and violent period.
Arresting ... n the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.
Sardonic ... The double-edged title notwithstanding, Witt’s bleakly brilliant book is about a time when both health and safety are rare—and getting rarer. Self-eviscerating, honest, often painful—a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age.
