Winter Reading
for personal use or to correct social and economic inequities.
The examples and stories are intriguing, unexpected and
satisfying by turns. It turns out, by the way, that the fame of
Albert Einstein can be explained in part by the same factors
that powered the $8.8 million Kickstarter launch of the game
Exploding Kittens. — Carol Cruzan Morton
semi-professional wrestlers; dank, beer-soaked frat dudes
and adult skateboard camps, but allusions to and wisdom
from previous tales and adventures will be lost. Though
this commentary reads more like a college freshman
literature paper than the fluid storytelling that Knapp —
the managing editor of Tin House — has the knack for, the
author wrestles with big questions weaving his personal
meditations with commentary on what great writers have
had to say. — Max Thornberry
essays
America: The Farewell Tour by Chris
Nobody Cares by Anne T. Donahue. ECW Press,
Hedges. Simon & Schuster, $27.
$15.99.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris
Hedges is one of a kind — a lone, furious voice crying
in the wilderness of our national and global collapse. The
diagnosis, needless to say, is dire. An equal
opportunity iconoclast with a voluminous
knowledge of political theory, geo-global
politics and traditional Western liberalism,
Hedges relentlessly digs beneath the
outcroppings of our moral and social decay,
and his latest book is a corker: A searing
analysis of the consequences of a decade’s-
long assault on civic society by the neoliberal
forces of late-stage capitalism. No mere
abstractionist, Hedges — a war reporter
who has witnessed empire collapse first-
hand — travels to ground zero of America’s
decay and disenfranchisement, taking an
intimate look at U.S. communities ravaged
by poverty, addiction, unemployment and
pervasive hatred. This book pulls no punches. It’s a hard
but necessary read, and we dare not avert our eyes from
Hedges’ prognosis. “Corporate capitalism has made war
on the communal and the sacred,” Hedges writes. “These
bonds will be re-established or we will slip further into a
world where death is more attractive than life.” — Rick
Levin
Being a millennial American woman is hard. OK,
maybe not hard hard, in the way that other people in the
world are starving and dying, but it’s still hard, alright?
Anne T. Donahue dives into these very hardships in her
collection of personal essays, Nobody Cares. Partially
humorous and a little too-close-to-home, Donahue
tackles the absurdities of caring too much about social
media, dealing with the complexities of mental illness,
grieving over the loss of loved ones and just wanting to be
interesting. Donahue explores themes of the suffocating,
almost inherent selfishness and self-indulgence that come
with being a modern young woman trying to keep up and
curate an “image,” all while trying to wrestle with the fact
that in the end, nobody cares. — Meerah Powell
k Up Up, Down Down by Cheston Knapp,
Scribner, $25
Cheston Knapp’s debut goes about as well as you’d
expect the first book from a managing editor of a literary
magazine to go. The humanity and camaraderie you want
to — and sometimes do — feel with Knapp is too often
broken up by his use of $10 words when a 25-cent one
would do. Some reviewers have praised Knapp for his
expansive vocabulary, but it feels a little too try-hard,
breaking the brotherhood I feel with the writer who fears
that his career will never be as successful as he imagines
it to be.
Despite the stilted prose, Knapp delivers excellent
meditations on life, love and what it means to come of
age. The seven essays in Up Up, Down Down are roughly
connected. You can read them on their own and enjoy the
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