Having read this after The Invention of Wings, one can’t help but compare the two. In terms of the writing, plot structure, and character development, Monk Kidd’s later book, also set in South Carolina, prevails as the superior novel, if not quite the most memorable. Given the twelve years that separate them, I suppose this shouldn’t be too surprising, but Kidd’s talents as a writer have clearly flourished tremendously in that span of time. This is not to say that The Secret Life of Bees isn’t well written, because it is, but it did not grab me and refuse to let go like her 2014 masterpiece.

Beyond the noticeable backward drift in the caliber of her writing, I think what put me off was the overly saccharine tenor. Don’t get me wrong — I can do schmaltzy. In fact, I love schmaltzy, but I have to be on board with the general direction of the plot and it needs to feel organic in its delivery. In several spots, the ‘just-so’ sequence of events and the demeanor and personalities of the characters come across rather forced and unnatural. August Boatwright in particular has an elysian quality about her that lends the character an other-than-human aura. The perfected wisdom and virtue imbued in every word she utters robs her of authenticity and texture. This fits with the quasi-magical realism vibe Kidd was supposedly gunning for, but it didn’t help sell the character for me.

I did enjoy the element of beekeeping woven into the narrative and thought it offered some intriguing symbolism for the larger story. Kidd clearly did a lot of legwork exploring the science of hives and honeybees prior to charting a course for this novel, and their thematic presence throughout surely explains its lasting legacy since 2002. The vivid descriptions of Lily and August tending the hives left a strong impression, and I would have welcomed a few more of these moments.

The portrayal of Black characters by a white author is another potential sticking point. I think Kidd could have done a better job conveying that Lily’s pains and struggles are different both in kind and in degree from those shared by the nonwhite characters with whom she surrounds herself over the course of the novel. Part of this disconnect can be explained by the inherent limitations of telling the story through Lily’s eyes. As a young girl living a mostly sheltered, segregated life, she shouldn’t be expected to relate to, or have the vocabulary to describe, the contrasting lived experiences of those set apart in society. Still, I felt that more could have been done to manifest the starkly different realities inhabited by the central characters.

The friends of the Boatwright sisters also felt underdeveloped, more reminiscent of stereotypes than fully fleshed out characters. I wanted to hear about their personal struggles and racial tribulations, anything beyond what food they brought over and what type of hats they wore. If there’s any aspect of the book I felt unnecessarily watered down the racial friction of living in the deep south circa the early 1960s, it’s this one. The titular role of Black women as nurturing mother figures to a coming-of-age white girl seems passé and even insulting today, though I did appreciate those fleeting moments when Lily registers the scale of the racially charged landscape native to the era. I’ve yet to personally resolve the ethical status of white authors depicting Black voices, but I understand the perspective of critics who take a harsher stance against Kidd’s characterizations here.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t think the book necessarily deserves a lower score simply because it appeared earlier in Kidd’s career, or because direct comparisons with her 2014 standard-bearer leave much to be desired. As a work of literary fiction, it’s average — neither great nor terrible. The ambient backdrop of beekeeping elevates the narrative in original ways, but the goopy theatrics and unnatural characters weigh it back down. It’s possible this book just wasn’t for me and that others will derive greater value in accordance with their own personal experiences and the degree to which they connect with those of the characters. But if it’s a recommendation you’re after, my advice would be to skip this one and pick up The Invention of Wings for its better crafted story, its more historically grounded setting, its more enlivening characters, and its more eloquent prose, all of which combine to make it the irresistible page-turner I hoped this one would be.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Feature image: Syrphid’s Feast by Niels Strating

 
 
Richard Pipes’ primer covers the waning years of tsarism in Russia and the deposition of Nicholas II, the ensuing Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s rise to power, and the re-constituted Russian state under Lenin. The book’s contents conclude shortly after Lenin’s death in 1924, aged 54. Naturally, the main “characters” here are Vladimir Lenin, the theoretical basis of Bolshevism, and the longstanding traditions of Russian society — the canvas on which Leninism was superimposed. Toward the end we do get some brief remarks on Stalin, including the historical responsibility due Lenin for the deeds of his successor, but this serves as more of an entrée that’s left for later Russian chronologies to flesh out.

One of the more controversial issues surrounding this era concerns the connection between Marxism and Leninism as implemented under the Bolshevik regime. Here I can report the author surprised me. Given his Reaganite credentials, not to mention his family’s status as Polish refugees following Germany’s invasion at the onset of the Second World War, I expected him to hew rather closely to the views of Martin Malia and other staunchly anti-communist historians who insist that Lenin- and Stalin-esque regimes are more or less a natural consequence of Marxist-socialist philosophy. Instead, Pipes argues quite persuasively that the events of the October Revolution and the regime that took the place of tsarism were a unique function of the cult of personality around Lenin combined with the legacy of patrimonialism and other structural factors native to Russian society.
 

Lenin with a group of commanders in the Red Square, May 25, 1919.

 
In effect, Pipes shows that the Bolsheviks were not very good Marxists, despite rhetorical protestations to the contrary from the leading acts. A key feature of Marxism is the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie (capitalist ruling class) to the proletariat (the unwealthy subjects that comprise the working class). Yet at seemingly every opportunity, the Bolsheviks altogether ignored the needs of the working class, instead prioritizing the needs of the Party and the retention and accretion of power at all costs. If the interests of Lenin & Co. happened to coincide with those of the proletariat underclass, that was all the better, but where the two were in conflict, the former saw fit to hang the latter out to dry.
 

“If Marxism means anything, it means two propositions: that as capitalist society matures it is doomed to collapse from inner contradictions, and that this collapse (“revolution”) is effected by industrial labor (“the proletariat”). A regime motivated by Marxist theory would at a minimum adhere to these two principles…[the Bolsheviks] distorted Marxism in every conceivable way.”

 
Some historians and philosophers go further and argue that we shouldn’t refer to the Bolshevik Revolution as a ‘revolution’ at all since it was more akin to a putsch or a coup by an extreme ideological minority. In contrast to the National Socialist Party in Germany, which attained influence by means of democratic consent thanks to right-leaning factions with which Hitler’s overtures primarily resonated, the Bolsheviks yielded only slim representation in government until their proximity to power improved through the use of force and subterfuge and they began stacking the deck in their favor. The peasant class, which made up some 80 percent of the Russian population at the time, was for the most part passively ambivalent about tsarism and harbored a deep mistrust of the Bolshevik intelligentsia behind the seizure of power that set Russia on a new path.
 

“The so-called “October Revolution” was a classic coup d’état. The preparations for it were so clandestine that when Kamenev disclosed in a newspaper interview a week before the event was to take place, that the party intended to seize power, Lenin declared him a traitor and demanded his expulsion. Genuine revolutions, of course, are not scheduled and cannot be betrayed.”

“[The philosopher Nicholas] Berdiaev, who viewed the Revolution primarily in spiritual terms, denied that Russia even had a Revolution: “All of the past is repeating itself and acts only behind new masks.”

 
In practice — from the perspective of the evidence from the regimes with which they’re associated, the recorded words, deeds, and policies of its leadership, and the documented effects on Russian society — Leninism-Stalinism or Bolshevism shared precious little in common with the philosophy it purported to embody, and is best viewed historically as a perversion of Marxist thought.
 

“Indisputably, the theories underpinning bolshevism, notably those of Karl Marx, were of Western origin. But it is equally indisputable that Bolshevik practices were indigenous, for nowhere in the West has Marxism led to the totalitarian excesses of Leninism-Stalinism…A cause that yields different results in differences circumstances can hardly serve as a sufficient explanation.

Marxism had libertarian as well as authoritarian strains, and which of the two prevailed depended on a country’s political culture…Marx’s notion of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was sufficiently vague to be filled with the content nearest at hand, which in Russia was the historic legacy of patrimonialism. It was the grafting of Marxist ideology onto the sturdy stem of Russia’s patrimonial heritage that produced totalitarianism. Totalitarianism cannot be explained solely with reference to either Marxist doctrine or Russian history; it was the fruit of their union.

In view of these facts, ideology has to be treated as a subsidiary factor—an inspiration and a mode of thinking of the new ruling class, perhaps, but not a set of principles that either determined its actions or explains them to posterity. As a rule, the less one knows about the actual course of the Russian revolution, the more inclined one is to attribute a dominant influence to Marxist ideas.”

 
In the end, Leninism conformed strikingly closely to its predecessor, tsarism. This suggests that Lenin and his fellow travelers borrowed from familiar themes and practices employed by tsarist autocracy as well as gradually created the conditions to stretch them further. In doing so, they supplanted one form of totalitarianism with another, and in several respects eclipsed the repressive nature of earlier regimes.
 

“Tsarist patrimonialism rested on four pillars: (1) autocracy—that is, personal rule unconstrained by either constitution or representative bodies; (2) the autocrat’s ownership of the country’s resources, which is to say, the virtual absence of private property; (3) the autocrat’s right to demand unlimited services from his subjects, resulting in the lack of either collective or individual rights; and (4) state control of information. A comparison of tsarist rule at its zenith with the Communist regime as it looked by the time of Lenin’s death reveals unmistakable affinities.”

 
Finally, the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism, including how best to apportion responsibility for Stalin’s stint as potentate and the carnage that ensued, is among the most hotly debated issues by historians and philosophers alike. I think it’s fair to say from the available evidence that a substantial portion of the blame for Stalin can be placed at Lenin’s feet. After all, Stalin was Lenin’s protégé, with the latter virtually handing the former a “free and clear” dictatorship on a silver platter.

Their governance style, moreover, differed more in terms of degree than substance or practices. Both were uncompromising despots, but Stalin’s outgroup was wider. Where Lenin tried to court ethnic minorities during his rule (even if his doing so amounted to insincere gestures layered in pretext), Stalin outright anathematized those same groups and incorporated them into his systematic persecution of political dissidents.
 

“That in the last months of his active life Lenin developed doubts about Stalin and came close to breaking off personal relations with him should not obscure the fact that until that moment he had done everything in his power to promote Stalin’s ascendancy…Stalin was the only person who belonged to all three of the ruling organs of the Central Committee: the Politburo, the Orgburo, and the Secretariat… Lenin ensured that the man who controlled the central party apparatus controlled the Party and through it the state. And that man was Stalin…There is no indication that he ever saw Stalin as a traitor to his brand of communism.

Beyond the strong personal links binding the two men, Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron’s political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism saved one—murdering fellow Communists—he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin’s megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that this ideology and modus operandi were Lenin’s. A man of meager education, he had no other model or source of ideas.”

 
Whereas the belief that German history would have taken the same course sans Hitler is far from assured, the case for Russia leaving a fundamentally different mark on world events without Stalin at the helm is less straightforward, to say the least. Had Lenin lived longer, we have almost every reason to believe that another two or three decades in power would have produced outcomes not unlike the history we have now. Lenin, after all, was the mastermind behind the Soviet Union and laid the foundations for the escalating inhumanity and cruelty Stalin later brought to fruition.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading:

• The Day That Shook the World
• Does the Russian Revolution have any relevance today?
• October by China Miéville review – a brilliant retelling of the Russian Revolution
• What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened?
• Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution

Feature image credit: Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images

 
 
My recent decision to leave Facebook was one I didn’t take lightly. As I explained at the time, there wasn’t any unique revelation or watershed moment behind the decision. It’s more that I had wanted to step away for some time and felt it was the right thing to do, but the very nature of Facebook (no doubt combined with a lack of self-control on my part) delayed my exit.

As if on cue, The Social Dilemma (trailer) released on Netflix this past Wednesday. Just a happy coincidence of course that this documentary came out so soon after leaving a platform that consumed countless hours of my life over the past decade, but it served up a nice dose of catharsis, I must say. I recommend it both for those who may be considering their own departure from certain apps and websites and for those who’d like a refresher on the sweeping impacts these spaces continue to have on connected society.

There’s nothing particularly revelatory on offer in its hour and a half runtime. In the current attention economy, major players like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest view humans, us, as an extractable resource. We — explicitly our preferences, desires, beliefs, impulses, and the built-in potential for these elements to be dialed up or down — are the product being sold, while advertisers are the customers. Again, nothing too earth-shattering; the basic blueprint remains essentially unchanged from the launch of Facebook 16 years ago.

What elevates this production over previous attempts at consciousness-raising, I think, are the messengers you hear from. Former Design Ethicist for Google, Tristan Harris, takes center stage as one of the leading voices in this space, having put out a number of TED talks and testified before Congress about the misaligned incentives baked into social media and how its tendency to bring out the worst in society is a feature and not a bug. You hear from senior executives at Facebook. You hear from the former president of Pinterest. You hear from literally the guy who invented the Facebook “Like” button. These aren’t bit players in Silicon Valley or industry outsiders. These are the experts who built and helped grow these platforms — and who now harbor grave doubts their creations are a force for good.

While the information they impart here shouldn’t be too surprising to those with some insight into how these platforms work, it’s nonetheless a compelling synthesis of the variegated problems that have emerged over time: increased ideological polarization, the exacerbation of fake news, election hacking, and other manipulation by bad actors. While these problems existed in some form or another prior to the inception of large-scale social networks, never before have there been tools so uniquely well-positioned to exploit vulnerabilities in our psychology. As one of the featured experts notes, “It’s not that highly motivated propagandists didn’t exist before, it’s that the platforms of today spread manipulative narratives with phenomenal ease — and without very much money.”

A rebuttal we often hear from people who argue the concerns around these spaces are overblown is that we will eventually adapt to social media, in much the same way we’ve always learned to live with and accommodate the next big thing. After all, we had to adapt to newspapers, radio, film and television, and the pre-social media internet, and this is merely the next evolution of that trend.

Tristan Harris and others address this argument head-on by emphasizing an important distinction that sets social media apart from earlier innovations. He uses the analogy of a bicycle. When the bicycle was invented, it didn’t feed addictive tendencies, it didn’t polarize society, it didn’t elevate the fake news crisis, and there weren’t concerns it would erode the fabric of democracy. That’s because a bicycle is simply a tool, a dormant device that wants nothing from us. Social media and other networked applications, in contrast, have their own goals and their own mechanisms by which to pursue those goals. Rather than a passive, tool-based technology, these are persuasion-based technologies that actively manipulate you by using your own psychology against you. The current state of our social media represents a true paradigm shift in how humanity interacts with the world and with each other.

As I conveyed in my Facebook farewell two weeks ago, because the algorithms driving these platforms prioritize overall engagement over social harmony — according to the company’s own admission and internal research — there’s an inbuilt tendency to divide users. Harris cites a well known study which found that fake stories on Twitter spread 6x faster than a true story. The takeaway is clear: fake news and sensational lies boost engagement; the truth, meanwhile, is boring. And thanks to machine learning and recommendation engines (the heart and soul of these mediums), Twitter & Co.’s facility for spreading falsehood improves by the day. Alas, this certainly helps explain absurd offline phenomena like “Pizzagate” and the notion that eating Chinese food can give you coronavirus.

As an aside, I also couldn’t help but notice an unmentioned subtext here that this whole corrosive situation in which we find ourselves came about by and large through the collective efforts of white men (and women) who unleashed these technological behemoths on society, while the divisions and other society-engulfing downstream consequences of their actions have been felt largely by Black and other minority groups across America. This isn’t an angle explored in the documentary, but I do think it’s an important one, especially as we contemplate how to best improve these platforms going forward.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out if you have the time.

Feature image credit: GETTY

 
 
I feel a mix of inspiration, remorse, and frustration to know that the conversation around mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex was happening in earnest at the turn of the century — as I was making my way through middle school. Inspiration because brilliant intellectuals like Angela Davis have challenged the status quo for decades now, beckoning us to reimagine our approach to state punishment as more of our fellow citizens begin a new life behind bars. Remorse because so much of this conversation is as new to me as it is utterly shocking. But mostly I feel frustration that after all these years, advocacy efforts continue to be thwarted by perverse incentives and structural inertia.

Angela Yvonne Davis is no stranger to the injustice of the American prison system, having served a 16-month stint in New York City in 1971, partly in solitary confinement. She was briefly placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list courtesy of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, at the time only the third woman to make the list. She was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Following her incarceration, Davis became an icon for the prison abolition movement, spearheading a number of causes and organizations, including Critical Resistance, a grassroots group dedicated to dismantling the global prison industrial complex. Her treatise, Are Prisons Obsolete?, shines a light on the catastrophe of mass incarceration, examining its origins and evolution, and points us toward a new vision of justice.

Regrettably, the problems she identifies have only grown more pressing in the wake of her bracing manifesto. Writing in 2003, Davis cites an incarcerated population of 2.1 million, while the latest figure from the Prison Policy Initiative stands at 2.3 million. To unpack this number a bit further, as of last count there are 2,270,800 people confined to 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails, not inclusive of those in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the US territories. If we expand the scope to all US adults under some form of correctional supervision, the number swells to 6.8 million. These figures can be contrasted, as Davis does, with the late 1960s, when the prison population stood at under 200,000.
 

Incarcerated Americans, 1920-2014

 
These are not typos. By any measure, the US has by far the largest prison population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. In fact, despite making up about 5% of the world’s population, the US accounts for between one-fifth and one-quarter of its prisoners. According to data compiled by World Prison Brief and the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, the US rate is 655 per 100,000 people, versus 107 for Canada, 135 for England & Wales, 169 for Australia, 124 for Spain, 104 for Greece, 60 for Norway, 63 for Netherlands, 39 for Japan, and 37 for Iceland. No other country is within hailing distance when it comes to the number of citizens it locks up.
 

Incarceration rates by country, 1981-2007

 
In her introduction, Davis reflects back on how dramatically, and how quickly, these numbers have grown since she took up the mantle of confronting one of the largest and most consistent state-sponsored social programs of our time:
 

“When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded something like this: ‘As racist and undemocratic as this country may be, I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism.'” (p. 11)

 
The situation becomes more troublesome when you parse the data from the perspective of race. Seventy percent of the US prison population today is composed of racial minorities, with Black women and Native Americans the fastest growing groups in this pie. As is also well known, the Black imprisonment rate is more than 5 times the white imprisonment rate, and the rate for African American women is more than twice that of white women. For 2018, 1,730 out of every 100,000 African Americans were behind bars, while the equivalent Hispanic and white per-capita rates were 856 and 274, respectively. Again, if you think those are typos, you haven’t been paying attention.
 

US prison population by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2015

 
A different way of thinking about this is that although African Americans and Hispanics make up 32% of the US population, they comprise over half — 56% in 2015 — of all incarcerated people. If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%. Tell me that wouldn’t save a hefty chunk of the more than $80 billion the US government spends on imprisonment every year.

Davis explains how the effects of mass incarceration have always fallen most heavily on African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinx communities:
 

“The racialization of crime…did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crimes continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of ‘racial profiling’ in our time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one’s skin is not mere speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the absence of probable cause.” (p. 31)

 
You might think that the era of incarceration in which we still live at least has logical or defensible origins. You might think, as I once did, that our heightened avidity for removing growing numbers of citizens from society and placing them behind bars was coincident with rising levels of crime. But in fact, during the Reagan-Bush years, when the “tough on crime” ethos took center stage and crime was hyped as among the greatest social ills of the day, crime statistics of all varieties, including homicides and property crimes, were in decline.
 

Homicide Rate in the US per 100,000, 1960-2016

Property Crime in the United States, 1960-2014

 
Both the murder and property crime rates peaked in 1980, and were already falling by the time Reagan took office. Though violent crime saw a brief resurgence in the late 1980s and early 90s, it fell sharply afterward and has continued to decline over the past quarter century. A very similar story played out for the property crime rate, which peaked in 1980, increased between Reagan’s second term and Bush Sr.’s first term, and has consistently declined thereafter. Yet inmate counts continue to climb.

What did happen, which has ended up accounting for much of the increase in the US prison population, was an expansion of criminalized behavior. As Davis notes, at the same time that prison construction took flight across the country, “draconian drug laws were being enacted, and ‘three-strikes’ provisions were on the agendas of many states.” Akin to how a broadening of diagnostic techniques accounts at least in part for the increase in cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in recent decades, new classifications of criminal conduct help explain the proliferation of imprisoned persons. This shift in focus manifested in harsher sentencing practices for petty drug offenses and disproportionate numbers of incarcerated Black and Brown Americans. Today, there are more people behind bars for drug offenses than all of the people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980.

As our prison population started spiraling, media coverage generated greater interest in crime-centric lawmakers and a consequent demand for more and larger prisons. Of course, the sorts of crimes that garner broad public interest are not the sorts of crimes for which increasing numbers of people were being sent to jail, but that didn’t stop local news from concentrating its attention on murders and shootings, which were falling throughout the 1990s. As journalist Vince Beiser reported in 2001, “According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, crime coverage was the number-one topic on the nightly news over the past decade. From 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.” During this pivotal decade, when its influence could have helped move the needle in the opposite direction, mainstream media’s role in shaping public perceptions of crime instead abetted politicians and interest groups whose success was wedded to mass incarceration.

Our incarceration binge thus began with opportunistic politicians creating false narratives about public endangerment from criminal elements, which fostered waves of new legislation, including tougher sentencing laws that kept offenders locked up longer. An ongoing prison construction boom shortly followed, carving out niches for private industry in the form of lucrative government contracts. This unprecedented deployment of capital was matched by enormous social costs absorbed principally by communities of color for generations. Meanwhile, the misleading narratives coming from the top were zealously fed by the media, preying on the public’s fear of crime to boost ratings and thereby reinvigorating support for legislative crackdowns along with new bursts of spending on federal and state penitentiaries.

The Prison Industrial Complex

With or without hindsight, it should have been obvious that such a pernicious cycle — kept afloat by Republican and Democrat administrations alike — would culminate in what we refer to today as the prison industrial complex (PIC). Though our understanding of this phenomenon has evolved over time, Davis describes it as the sprawling web of relationships that exist between private entities and the prison institution, together with the incentive structures that sustain it. Despite the tangible associations the term tends to connote, it is not an isolated, physical entity but a far more sinister force that since its inception has served to exacerbate a number of existing social problems.
 

“Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political and ideological life of the United States and the transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas.” (p. 107)

 
Due to the tremendous demand for prison space that accompanies the war on crime, and the large variety of goods and services a skyrocketing prison population requires, corporate involvement in state punishment has escalated over the last four decades. From construction contracts and surveillance technologies to health care, food, and phones, private companies sell their products to correctional facilities in all fifty states, deepening the ties between punishment and profit. And as publicly managed facilities have become overcrowded, federal and state governments have increasingly turned to private companies to share in the housing burden.
 

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the numerous private prison companies operating in the United States own and operate facilities that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners. Texas and Oklahoma can claim the largest number of people in private prisons…In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system [in the aftermath of the Civil War], federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.” (p. 95)

 
Though private prisons still make up a minority of total prisons in America, the trend toward for-profit prisons is an alarming one. Davis cites Joel Dyer in his book The Perpetual Prison Machine: How America Profits from Crime: “In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the United States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight states.”

I wanted more recent data on this, so I did some desk research. Since 2000, the federal prison system alone has seen a 120% increase in the use of private prisons, with the number of people housed in private facilities growing 47% over this period. As of 2016, 128,063 people serve their time in for-profit prisons, or 8.5% of the total state and federal prison population. And now, with the previous Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to overturn the Obama-era policy that sought to phase out private prison contracts, we can expect the growing corporatization of the prison economy to continue well into the future.

Women and Gendered Punishment

Davis also delves into the unique challenges women face in the prison, in what may be the most eye opening chapter of the book. It wasn’t until the 1870s, thanks to the decadeslong struggle of Quaker reformers, that separate prisons for women started to appear in the United States. But because the prison is an environment originally devised by and constructed for men, gender-specific accommodations have always been lacking, even in the twenty-first century.

There are now more than 111,000 women in prison nationwide, a large majority of whom have chronic histories of physical and substance abuse, HIV, hepatitis and other illnesses. The differing health care and other needs of women and men is a reality not often reflected at the institutional level. Private sector involvement in both women’s and men’s prisons, moreover, means that those signing the checks tend to cater to the lowest common denominator, without consideration of the needs or vulnerabilities of female inmates.

Integral to this history is how preconceptions about gender have informed the ways in which the state has punished women. Women historically have been given harsher sentences than men, which Davis owes to the markedly different attitudes society has about women convicts compared to their male counterparts. “Masculine criminality,” Davis writes, “has always been deemed more ‘normal’ than feminine criminality.” (p. 66) Therefore a woman committing the same crime as a man must be that much more socially deviant and criminal in nature, with fewer possibilities for reform and redemption.
 

“Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitence and reform. The very forfeiture of rights and liberties implied that with self-reflection, religious study, and work, male convicts could achieve redemption and could recover these rights and liberties. However, since women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption. According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen women, with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had simply violated the social contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of womanhood.” (pp. 69-70)

 
These sexist tropes went on to dictate the gendered punishment programs administered by the state. Unlike the rehabilitation efforts afforded men which focused on isolation and hard labor, programs for women centered more on promoting domestic skills. This was surely a reflection of the fact that not only did women have fewer rights than men, but they also had fewer options both in and outside the prison walls. Drawing from Joanne Belknap’s work, the aim of one of the first US reformatories opened in 1874 was to:
 

“…train the prisoners in the “important” female role of domesticity. Thus an important role of the reform movement in women’s prisons was to encourage and ingrain “appropriate” gender roles, such as vocational training in cooking, sewing and cleaning. To accommodate these goals, the reformatory cottages were usually designed with kitchens, living rooms, and even some nurseries for prisoners with infants.” (p. 71)

 
Those women that could not be “reformed” in the traditional sense would be passed off to the clinician and issued psychoactive substances as treatment. Here again, because of the perception that female crime was unorthodox and outside the bounds of normal female behavior, perpetrators were deemed to be of unsound mind. This meant that women, unlike men, were more likely to be treated clinically rather than criminally, with more women serving time in psychiatric institutions than in prisons. “That is,” Davis sums up, “deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.” This paradigm runs through to present day, with imprisoned women far more likely than men to be given psychiatric drugs as part of their treatment plan.

Though modern conditions in women’s prisons are no doubt an improvement over historical times in terms of more humane treatment and the variety of services available, in many ways the system has failed to keep pace with the changes that the introduction of greater numbers of women requires. The widespread and well documented sexual abuse of imprisoned women presents an enduring crisis for which the state cannot relinquish responsibility. Routinization of practices like the strip search and body cavity search, often conducted by male officers, amounts to state-sanctioned sexual assault, as recounted by ex-incarcerated activists like Assata Shakur — now living in Cuba after being granted political asylum in 1984 — and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and illustrated in hit series like Orange is the New Black.
 

“As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases…sexual abuse…has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.” (pp. 77-78)

Abolition, Not Reform

Finally, Davis turns to alternative approaches to incarceration. If we conclude that the prison has indeed become obsolete, with what do we replace them? Where will all of the prisoners — the murderers and the rapists — go? What might that society look like? Given how the prison as an institution is so deeply embedded in our social psyche, the mere idea of abolishing it can seem rather daunting. Davis argues that this is the wrong way to think about such a formidable problem, urging us to think bigger.
 

“It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system…it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.” (p. 106)

 
In her view, the key to upending the status quo lies in untangling the relationships that cement the PIC as a seemingly permanent fixture of our society. At a minimum, this means divorcing corporate profit from state punishment by reducing reliance on private prisons and removing the economic incentives that make the PIC tick. It also means dislodging the prison from our social consciousness — in short, removing its ever present stamp on our society. It involves cutting the mic of self-seeking politicians, correcting the historical record on crime, and disseminating the facts about US incarceration. And it entails communicating a bold, progressive vision that lends inspiration for the future and seeks to mend what has already been broken.

An unabashed countercultural revolutionary for the better part of her life, Davis isn’t one to soft pedal the radical transformations realizing such a vision will require. To meaningfully confront the epidemic of mass incarceration and usher in a more egalitarian system of justice, she insists we target both ends of the pipeline: not only rolling back many of the wrongheaded legislative decisions of the past forty years, but also addressing the systemic issues that create vacuums for crime.

What might this look like in practice? Eliminating excessive sentencing rules such as mandatory minimums; applying greater pressure to prosecutors and law enforcement with respect to transparency and accountability; formally ending the colossally misconceived war on drugs; shoring up immigrant’s rights and protections for refugees fleeing harsh conditions in their own countries; decriminalizing sex work; and shifting our penal priorities in the direction of rehabilitation, substance abuse prevention, educational reforms, and correcting the pervasive inequality, both economic and racial, that threatens the fabric of US society.
 

“An abolitionist approach…would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.” (pp. 107-108)

 
Davis is careful to note that this doesn’t mean we forsake the needs of the currently incarcerated in our quest for more just horizons. We still must bring an end to the profit motive underlying the unethical practices and outcomes caused by lapses in officer training, understaffing and overcrowding in our prisons, for instance, so long as those institutions persist. The lives and human rights of prisoners will always matter, even as we fight to terminate the conditions and systems that put them there in the first place.
 

“Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system.” (p. 103)

Closing Thoughts

Angela Davis has been on the front lines of the prison abolition and decarceration movements for longer than I’ve been alive. In her careful yet uncompromising book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis presents a compelling case that the prison as an institution intended to solve our social problems is beyond saving. Rather than mitigating the racism, misogyny, toxic masculinity, sexual violence and other constants in our society, Davis says our current system merely hides them away — where they take on a “ghastly vitality behind prison walls” — and renders them less visible to the public eye. She invites us to consider whether carceral approaches to justice are still, or ever were, valid. Does locking more people in cages actually enhance public safety, or, as the evidence suggests, lead to recidivism and accelerate the cycle of poverty and racial inequity?

She further asks us to envision a society no longer in need of prisons. Though this closing section could have been more developed, Davis sprinkles in more than enough ideas and real world examples to jumpstart the conversation. For the United States to embrace sustainable alternatives, we will need to kick our unhealthy obsession with punishment and begin diverting resources away from the prison industrial complex to which we’ve collectively succumbed and toward housing, accessible health care, education, drug treatment programs, and jobs for disadvantaged communities. Perhaps then we will have cultivated a society in which the School and other institutions of promise achieve more cultural resonance than the Prison.

Further reading and resources:

• Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex
• Critical Resistance project
• The 13th
• How We Got to Two Million: How did the Land of the Free become the world’s leading jailer?
• Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020
• The Sentencing Project
• NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Statistics

 
 
Few may know this, but Timothy Snyder’s book actually originated with a Facebook post he published back on November 15, 2016 — one week after Donald Trump’s election. “Americans,” it began, “are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” Those wise words on how to oppose fascism were then expanded into a pamphlet of sorts, a timely DIY-style guide on how to defend democracy at home.

You can read the bulletin in its original form at the link above if you want a taste of the lessons imparted here. Rest assured, this isn’t one that you read once and put back on the shelf, never to visit again. Given the trajectory of the last two years, I find myself picking it back up from time to time, simultaneously awestruck and discouraged to find how relevant are its warnings and exhortations. As a reviewer on Goodreads so eloquently put it: “No matter your politics, fascism and authoritarianism arise when we’re looking another way, distracted, numb to history. The only way to get out in front of and stop a tyrant is to know what we’re looking for. A book like this can save our country and unite us toward a common goal of change, of striving for democracy, and protect us from the dangers of our own rotten impulses.”

The rise of fascism and Nazism that gripped our grandparents’ generation, and the historical contexts in which they emerged, offer a bounty of insight into understanding our present political and social order and the foreseeable means by which they can unravel. Never has there been a better reason to arm ourselves with the knowledge of the recent past than that we might anticipate and oppose budding incursions into civil liberties and free society.

The onslaught of corruption and incompetence evidenced in the current administration has failed to register much more than a hint of surprise among those of us who expressed concern from the beginning. For anyone familiar with the undemocratic maneuvers favoring the autocratic regimes of the previous century, warning signs were everywhere. As a friend remarked at the time, the early indicators of abnormalcy gleamed “like a flashing light at a railroad crossing.” When we referred to the despot-elect as a fascist, we meant it rather as a noun, not an adjective. We didn’t want to be right, but neither were we willing to bet our democracy that we were wrong.

A unilateral power play here, another broken norm there. As examples of executive misconduct stack up and political rivalries intensify, we find ourselves faced with a momentous decision as a nation. Do we continue on this foundering rollercoaster on the assumption we can disembark at will? This is a question that seems scarcely entertained by the president’s most fervid surrogates. Those continuing to pledge their steadfast support dawdle and dither with denial and deflection, chalking up the president’s around the clock imprudence to unorthodox methods and a heavy touch, and in so doing have all but lost their sense of right and wrong. The historical parallels here, as Snyder so poignantly conveys throughout this guidebook, are unmistakable.

Hitler, lest we never forget, also campaigned on a raft of false promises and hyper-nationalist bigotry. Like 45, he tapped into a disaffected bloc seeking economic restitution. And as we’re observing from our front-row seats in the Trump era, businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals at the time endorsed their demagogue du jour so as not to deviate too sharply from public opinion. They rationalized by telling themselves that Hitler’s wilder promises would never come to pass — that there were bigger issues at stake. How do we look back now at the millions of Germans who supported history’s darkest figure?

Normalization is the last gasp of democracy. Prewar Germany was filled with well meaning citizens as wise and as reasonable as today’s electorate who brushed off Hitler’s anti-Semitism and ethno-nationalist rhetoric as all posture and bravado with no bite. As a result, their institutions and their society gradually but surely slid virtually unnoticed from a state of normalcy in which freedoms were taken for granted into explicit despotism. What happened then can happen now. Indeed, if recent events have shown us anything, it’s that our political system and its outdated institutions are vulnerable to the kind of undoing authoritarians are especially primed to exploit. Our vulnerabilities are different from those of 1930s Europe, but the institutions on which we rely are susceptible all the same to bad actors and extreme partisanism.

The sweep of history unfolds over time, not overnight, something we as prisoners of the present tend to forget. Thankfully, the lessons and protocols haven’t changed. I found Snyder’s shrewd wisdoms inspiring, so much so that I fashioned them into a few of my own.

Resist the impulse to normalize. Lest desensitization and apathy set in, cling to your sense of outrage and keep it as well honed as the day is long. A loss of the latter will only ease the former along in historically dangerous directions.

When not guided by logic and reason, any fiction can be your reality. Indeed, an assault on truth and fact-based communication is fundamental to authoritarian regime changes throughout history. Adhere to facts and refuse to acquiesce to “alternative” unevidenced realities. Rebuff sophists in power who deliberately abuse the norms of civil discussion. Treat truth as the virtue that it is and reject con-man attempts to paint what is true as partisan fancy.

A compromise on or renunciation of verifiable reality is the most fatal step on the path to an undemocratic future. Rerouting from the current trajectory starts with civil resistance and noncompliance on the part of elected leaders, government workers, and ordinary citizens like you and me. As the past century’s European societies illustrate, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

I’ll close with two of my favorite quotes from this stunningly important book:
 

“Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.” (p. 72)

“Stand out. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.” (p. 51)

 
For more discussion of this book and the urgency of its insights, see this interview with the author at Vox.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading and resources:

• • Strength Through Unity: How To Spot Fascism Before It’s Too Late
  • The Road to Tyranny 
  • We overanalyze Trump. He is what he appears to be.
  • Autocracy: Rules for Survival
  • How to preserve the ideals of liberal democracy in the face of a Trump presidency
  • This Is Not Normal
  • Trump won, and Amy Siskind started a list of changes. Now it’s a sensation.
  • The War on Facts Is a War on Democracy
  • How did Hitler rise to power?
  • Hitler’s Rise to Power
  • The American Abyss: “Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”

Image credit: ALBERT ZAWADA, AGENCJA GAZETA

 
 
The movement Black Lives Matter emerged onto the social justice scene in 2013 following the murder of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, his killer. Founded by three women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — its goal has been to shine a light on the systemic injustice, expressed in violence and targeted discrimination, that haunts men and women of color across America, and to make equal rights and equal dignity a reality, not merely at the level of the law but at the level of everyday life.

As more names and more bodies have piled up behind Trayvon Martin, including Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Marlene Pinnock, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and countless others, Black Lives Matter has become a call to action that challenges all Americans to reckon with the horrors of police brutality and the modern criminal justice system and the endemic racial woes that have been allowed to fester in our society for far too long.

“Thus, it was the death and failure of our justice system to account for the unnecessary death of a black American that prompted three women to offer these three basic and urgent words to the American people: black lives matter.” So writes Christopher Lebron, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University, in the introduction to his excellent 2017 primer on the movement, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.

From the start, BLM has been a loosely organized grassroots movement with no formal structure. It has since grown and blossomed and now has an international presence. Accompanied by hashtags and T-shirts sporting the ubiquitous slogan, like-minded activists have formed dozens of local chapters that regularly engage in organized protests and political demonstrations. Its rapid cultural uptake has also inspired a number of sister groups like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and Campaign Zero.

Consistent with any movement or ideology that’s attained critical mass, BLM has taken on a number of different perspectives, interpretations, and goals. While the aspirations and tactics of those who act under its banner vary and may not always align with the views of its founders, the diversified movement is generally if not universally marked by an acute concern for human rights and its uncompromising demands for racial justice.

Lebron captures the unorthodoxy of the movement thusly: “Eschewing traditional hierarchical leadership models, the movement cannot be identified with any single leader or small group of leaders, despite the role Cullors, Tometi, and Garza played in giving us the social movement hashtag that will likely define our generation. Rather, #BlackLivesMatter represents an ideal that motivates, mobilizes, and informs the actions and programs of many local branches of the movement.”

While the decentralized, pro-communal ethos of BLM fosters greater intellectual and political diversity and allows for more fluidity in terms of organizing, its informal nature also leaves its core principles and ambitions open to interpretation. In practice, this suscepts the movement to unfair, distorted, or otherwise wide-of-the-mark characterizations, both by those seeking to sustain the injustice the movement is meant to dismantle as well as by those who operate under its name. Therein lies the impetus behind Lebron’s book. As he explains, “The Black Power generation had in the sharp and brave tome penned by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, a published manifesto and theoretical edifice. In contrast, no such text exists to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter.”

To construct his canonical text, Lebron marshals the generative insights of a roster of heralded black intellectuals like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, and Langston Hughes, charting their unique contributions to black intellectual and creative life. During the course of this process, he touches on everything from black political expression and civic engagement to issues of gender, sexuality, and artistic expression in the black community.

From this richly textured history we see how the legacies of previous black influencers have informed the racial struggle movements of contemporary times. By probing deeper into each of these legacies, Lebron manages to craft an eloquent, authoritative primer that grounds the Black Lives Matter movement alongside an enduring tradition of black resistance against the institutional inequality of American life.

As is to be expected with an intellectual history rooted in philosophical ideals, Lebron’s book is dense and not for the faint of heart. While the scholarly tone may be off-putting to some, he packs plenty of insight into its slim, 150-page frame. How much one gets out of this book may ultimately depend on the volume and flavor of ideological baggage with which one goes into it. Those harboring ill will toward the movement will inevitably find ways to nourish that enmity despite its broad informational value, while those already on board with the movement’s essential purpose and its means and methods will walk away rejuvenated in the fight for racial progress.

But no matter one’s politics, color, or creed, it is incumbent upon all decent people to lend a fair and honest hearing to our generation’s defining social justice movement. Lebron’s sweeping distillations of generations of black thought and insight are worth the entry price alone, and the ways in which he connects historical activism to modern day struggles should bring renewed clarity to those pursuing a more equal and just world.

I have little doubt that Lebron’s careful, compelling book will maintain its relevance beyond the current era, but I would be remiss were I to conclude this review without mentioning how today’s political environment shapes the urgency of its message. The ascendance of Trump and the all too familiar themes of white supremacy encoded in his rhetoric have brought the subject of race and racial politics into the national spotlight once more.

While it is true that white supremacists and their co-conspirators were around long before Trump, it’s become increasingly clear that the current president has emboldened this contingent like never before. We’ve observed an alarming uptick in hate crimes since the day he took office, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other human rights groups. That is to say, the disreputables to which demagogues like Trump cater are no longer concealed behind societal expectations of decency and civility, but are out in broad daylight, spreading their hate and dehumanizing minority groups in record numbers.

It is in these historical moments that our moral mettle is tested. Those of us with privilege are invited to join hands with the oppressed and push back against the surge of intolerance that threatens black lives and black dignity and all peoples subjected to indecent treatment — because complacency in the face of unchecked hate is a choice.

Excerpts

I’ve pulled a few of my favorite excerpts from the book to include here.

“Such shame seemed to take on a sharper and, if it can be imagined, more urgent tone after the Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery but had failed to usher in an era of genuine black freedom. While blacks were unshackled from plantations, whites reminded them that their freedom remained dependent on whites’ goodwill. But that goodwill was not forthcoming. Instead, the era of black lynching and Jim Crow filled the space formerly occupied by slavery. As Reconstruction crumbled under President Andrew Johnson’s hammer blows, institutions relied less on controlling black bodies for labor and started controlling them with segregation and brutal punishment. White supremacy increasingly became an unmediated relationship between common white and black Americans as well as between blacks and institutions that were de facto and often de jure agents of white power interests.” (p. 3)

“The notion of black criminality was essential for white supremacists. If blacks were going to roam American streets free, then they were a threat to the lives of good, upstanding whites, and the government could not be counted on to practice exacting justice. Completely unfounded charges of crimes were offered up to turn the gears of racial vengeance within communities and institutions. Once these gears began moving, almost no person or institution could or would prevent the ensuing barbarity…By some estimates, more than 3,400 black Americans were lynched between 1862 and 1968.” (p. 4)

“The essence of radical politics is using unsanctioned means to effect change to disrupt the status quo.” ( p. 63)

“In present times, a common refrain to the slogan “black lives matter” is the disingenuous retort, “all lives matter.” This retort subverts the message of the original slogan by semi-sincerely worrying that to insist black lives matter must somehow mean that black lives matter more than other lives–in other words, those insisting that all lives matter are really concerned about what they perceive to be a fundamental inequality in the status of lives based on race. To these individuals it seems arbitrary that equality would be qualified by skin color. Of course, to most black observers, this is the height of bitter irony since the precise substance of saying “black lives matter” is to instate a nonarbitrary form of equality that eliminates the systematic endangerment of black lives, whether at the hands of the police by gunshot or at the welfare office through resource withholding.” (pp. 81-82)

“Were Cooper a present-day activist she would most certainly admire Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the three black women who founded BlackLivesMatter.org. Their position has been that #blacklivesmatter must encompass black lives on both sides of the gender divide and across the spectrum of sexual identification. Cooper was one of the most important early feminist thinkers to argue that black women are worthy humans—their skin color was not a warrant for dehumanizing them; their sex was not a reason for rendering them invisible, mute, and usable.” (p. 83)

“For Lorde, blacks who did not support gay rights, especially those of black gays and lesbians, failed to see that the struggle of homosexuals was not of a different kind from their own, but, rather, was simply taking place in a different key.” (p. 94)

“James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. were powerful proponents of the role of love in American race relations. For them, love was the key to democratic redemption.” (p. 99)

“The use of nonviolent protest as a cornerstone for national moral progress remains one of King’s enduring contributions to American society, and it was grounded in the notion of love.” (p. xix)

“The average white American in the middle of the twentieth century did not grasp that “separate but equal” was a moral offense against blacks. Blacks saw deeper into that principle—they rightly perceived that separate meant quite the opposite of equal and that Jim Crow was white supremacy by any means necessary.” (pp. 101-102)

“Blacks, then, face a very tangible predicament. Baldwin’s call for blacks to love themselves is demanding, but his additional call for blacks to love whites despite the pains and torments of racial oppression can sometimes seem unreasonably demanding. It calls to mind a kind of schizophrenia in which my self-respect requires anger against white power but in which my soul also requires that I be compassionate despite the rage.” (p. 112)

“What has gone wrong in the claim that “all lives matter” is not that it is false. Rather, it is beside the point as a matter of both hubris and lack of imagination. Further, it obfuscates the question of identity altogether as well as the different kinds of value placed on various identities.” (p. 143)

“The person who wonders why Sandra Bland spoke back to the cop in question cannot see what Sandra saw—an imminent threat to her personhood. Bland’s, and everyone else’s death, then, is a false enigma, a puzzle easily solved with the key of white privilege.” (p. 155)

“Do or do not black lives matter? We still wait for America’s response. But the question has been asked, the conversation is being demanded, and there are yet other futures to be written if we so will it.” (p. 151)

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

 
 
Before launching the editor to write up this review, I checked my iTunes library and discovered that I have seven and a half hours of Moby’s songs on my laptop, some of which have been played hundreds of times. As an avid listener for nearly two decades now, however, I knew precious little about the musician himself.

I didn’t know he grew up dirt poor and lived for several years out of an abandoned factory in Stamford, Connecticut with not much more to his name than some assembled DJ equipment and an electric hot plate. I didn’t know that he wrestled for most of his life over what it means to be a Christian and whether he was one. I didn’t know he released a punk rock album in 1996 that nearly crashed his career. Nor was I aware that he once had a full head of hair and that his losing it, along with the ebb and flow of his early musical career, persistently plagued his wavering self-image.

Now I had learned that he declined the usual route of handing your story to a ghostwriter and instead chose to go it alone, earning himself a glowing blurb from none other than Salman Rushdie in the process.

This 2016 memoir-cum-bildungsroman covers what I take to be the most pivotal decade of Moby’s life (1989-99). It precedes his meteoric rise ushered in with the release of Play, as it was during this interval that a young, David Lynch-obsessed artist living in squalor and struggling to make ends meet put his hopeful ambition to the test. This is Moby at his most raw, the literary counterpart to the brooding lyrics and emotional vulnerability echoed throughout his diverse catalog. His anxieties, frustrations, and patient reflections are all on full display, enabling a clearer image of the life and mind behind such masterpieces as “Honey,” “Flower,” and “Go.”

Today Richard Melville Hall — a patronym completely usurped by his familiar stage handle — is uncontroversially regarded on both sides of the pond as among the world’s most influential electronic musicians. But reaching such a high point of acclaim and notoriety was hardly preordained, even for one as talented as Moby. Sure, he rubbed elbows with Dream Frequency, 808 State, Underground Resistance, and other toplining acts in the thriving 90s rave scene, and later cut his teeth on international tours with the likes of Soundgarden, The Prodigy, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, but his ultimate status as an industry icon was never a guarantee.

The transition from quasi-homeless youth with sporadic access to running water to leading DJ for a new nightclub in the heart of Manhattan is a fascinating story in and of itself. When he caught wind of a club soon to open in the Meatpacking District, Moby scraped together the fare to make the trip from his ascetic abode in Connecticut to the anarchic streets of NYC. He waited in the long line of job-seekers, only to learn that busboys, bouncers, and bartenders were being hired, not DJs. He awkwardly left his mixtape with the staff anyway. One day later, he received the call that would change his life forever.

In Gotham’s rave scene circa the late 80s and early 90s, Moby was as much of an outlier as ever. Electronic music was still underground, and nightclubs of the era featured dancefloors populated almost solely by African Americans, Latinos, and LGBTs. Moby was none of the above. But it was here that he felt most at home, more so than with his Christian friends and at the faith-filled weekend retreats he found himself attending with his on-and-off girlfriend. The self-seeking judgment and mounting internal guilt that so engulfed his religious existence outside the club all but evaporated whilst spinning dancehall records for vibrant non-white crowds until the sun came up.

It’s no secret that the scent of nostalgia combined with the distance of time can cause one to idealize a complicated past. Moby attests to the dangers of living in New York City in 1989. Ravaged by AIDS and crack and gang violence, the city was infamous for the highest murder rate per capita in the country, with “teenagers running through Times Square and stabbing tourists with infected syringes,” ran one story in the Post, where “kids routinely walked through the [subway] cars stabbing people and stealing their watches and wallets and chains and sneakers.” Nevertheless, for Moby SoHo, with its quiet lofts and art galleries, was home, part of “a perfect city” — and where DJ genius was born.

Perhaps the least surprising pivot in the book concerns his fraught relationship with alcohol and promiscuity, which marked a shift from his deacadeslong spree as a straight-edge, teetotaling animal rights activist. He never drops the veganism, of course, but as with any musical celebrity you can care to name, Moby battled with alcoholism over the years and liberally pursued a wanton sex life. He is straightforward and honest about this, never one to make excuses, even as he describes a series of bleak events in his life such as the loss of his mother and the looming dread that his career as a musician might be over.

Moby never renounces his Christian faith outright in his memoir. He does, however, recount his evolving views on religion and belief in God. Growing up in youth group, he vents often about a felt incompatibility between the actions of his fellow Christians on the one hand and living what he believed to be a truly ethical life on the other — one committed to lessening the suffering of others, both of the human and nonhuman variety. He notes that reading Sartre and Camus and exposure to existentialist philosophy in college helped undermine his confidence in theistic traditions. At one point he describes a particularly resonant moment of satori in which the final vestiges of his Judeo-Christian worldview seemed to slip away, replaced by a humble sublimity that acknowledges human ignorance in the face of cosmic complexity.1

Closing Thoughts

Moby’s music has always carried with it a spark of inspiration, uniquely capable of catering to just the right mood for almost any occasion. Indeed, he’s the only artist I know of whose melodies can calm as effortlessly as they can energize. Though genres and tastes evolve, his recordings, both the more ambient soundscapes as well as the pulsating dance rhythms designed to be played at deafening volumes, have remained relevant through it all. His recent memoir, by turns glum and joyous, provides an unflinching look at Moby’s life as an aspiring musician navigating the bedlam of the Big Apple in the 1990s and the thought processes and influences that fed into his work.

For me his origin story raised a number of intriguing questions related to determinism versus chance — namely whether Moby’s success was shaped my random encounters, or whether musicians of his caliber and in possession of his talents were always destined for greatness at the outset. (I’d be curious to hear other’s thoughts on this question.) Whether you harbor a soft spot for Moby or not, Porcelain is a brooding, anxious, frequently insightful memoir that commemorates an intimate period in the life of a brilliant artist whose timeless music continues to inspire generations of fans around the world.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

1. About Alexandra Pelosi’s film Friends of God, Moby had this to say on his blog: “The movie reminded me just how utterly disconnected the agenda of the evangelical Christian right is from the teachings of Christ.”

 
 
Let’s cut right to the chase: I gained very little from this book. In between the pop-psychology, the right-wing apologism, the chapters that read as paid infomercials for the author’s other books and products, and the nauseating repetition, I gleaned precious few tidbits on how to grow your wealth. Adding to the problem is that many of these tidbits seem so broad and crashingly obvious that you begin to wonder if you’re being conned. Like a visit to the palm reader who foretells the most mundane of life’s coming attractions, Kiyosaki imparts basic wisdoms you could most likely arrive at on your own.

The prescription to build your asset column and pay less in taxes are hardly groundbreaking insights. Nor is the counsel that there’s no such thing as a no-risk investment. Neither is the instruction to pay experts for their expertise, and pay them well. It’s the steps in between that prove the bottleneck for most of us — the tricky part about acquiring the necessary funds to begin making meaningful moves financially. After the crippling student loans and exorbitant rent payments, those of us who call ourselves millennials have just barely enough to scrape together for living expenses like food and electricity, and far less for shrewd investments in stocks and real estate.

Kiyosaki urges that to become like the rich, we must seize the golden opportunities everyone else missed or passed over. “Great opportunities are not seen with your eyes. They are seen with your mind,” he writes (p. 200). If this sounds to you like utterly inactionable intel, you’re not alone. I personally need more than folk wisdom clichés before kickstarting my journey out of debt. Besides, golden opportunities don’t last long, and chances are that someone more financially secure than you are will have already pounced on it.

He does elaborate here and there on some of his honed practices, such as the scouting he does when surveying local real estate markets, and which assets he prioritizes in his portfolio (real estate and small-cap stocks, in case you were wondering). But most of these chapters are simply too thin on the ground to be of much use. For the most part, it’s the larger lessons that Kiyosaki’s interested in imparting, some of which may prove helpful to complete novices when it comes to investing.

His framing of cash flow is one of the more insightful areas of the book. He says that most people put their earned or ordinary income toward liabilities and expenses (the “Rat Race” reified by the middle class), whereas the smart investor procures income-generating assets that can cover expenses and, provided those cash flows are sufficiently large, can ultimately obviate the need for debt altogether. So for example, he advises to not buy a house until your mortgage can be paid entirely from asset-driven cash flows (e.g., passive or portfolio income) as opposed to active income. Prior to this, presumably, we would be better off remaining a renter*.

*(Yet in certain cases, namely high-value markets around the country, it can actually be cheaper to own than to rent. In places like New York, Denver, or Washington, DC, the monthly mortgage payment on a suburban house or condo can be cheaper than the rental cost of an apartment in the city. Especially if the market is expected to keep climbing, it can be more prudent to scrape the cash together for a down payment and start building equity than to continue throwing money into a rental black hole that you’ll never get back.)

You do learn a few other important items in the realm of finance, including the benefits of a 1031 tax-deferred exchange, the three basic types of income, and the relationship between an income statement and a balance sheet. But this kind of information is easily obtained elsewhere and is fairly common knowledge for anyone who attended business school. The balance of the book is, frankly, filled with folk psychology and teachings lifted straight from Sunday school. In his 10-step guide to cultivating your inner financial genius, one is titled “Teach and you shall receive: the power of giving”. Doing his best to channel self-help quack Rhonda Byrne in The Secret, he literally writes:
 

“If I could leave one single idea with you, it is that idea. Whenever you feel short or in need of something, give what you want first and it will come back in buckets…I know it is often the last thing a person may want to do, but it has always worked for me. I trust that the principle of reciprocity is true, and I give what I want. I want money, so I give money, and it comes back in multiples. I want sales, so I help someone else sell something, and sales come to me. I want contacts, and I help someone else get contacts. Like magic, contacts come to me.” (p. 305).

 
Perhaps the most controversial monetary advice he gives, or at least what cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom, is that a home is not an asset (but a liability), and that the old dogma of saving and diversifying is obsolete. I’m no financial guru, so I won’t come right out and declare this bad advice, but it seems to me that in terms of owning a house, it again depends on the market. If the value of your home is going up, you have an asset you can sell at a profit. If the local market is in decline, however, you can potentially be stuck with a property that is worth less than what you owe the bank, at which point it would indeed be strange to continue thinking of that property as an asset.

And one’s level of asset diversification depends on one’s aversion to risk, though for his part Kiyosaki recommends taking informed risks rather than playing it safe with a balanced portfolio. Any given investment, he writes, “is not risky for the financially literate…there is always risk. It is financial intelligence that improves the odds.” In fact it’s financial savvy, hard won through experience and failure, that turns what may seem to the uninitiated like gambling into informed investing.

That’s all sound as far as it goes, but I think what irked me most of all is Kiyosaki’s running theme that what separates the rich from the poor is, principally, financial literacy. Rich people know about loopholes in the tax code, for example, or hire expert accountants and financial advisers who do. The notion that it’s basic ignorance and psychological shortcomings that keep you from reaching the next level of financial security is one that’s repeated throughout. He writes:
 

“The main cause of poverty or financial struggle is fear and ignorance, not the economy or the government or the rich. It’s self-inflicted fear and ignorance that keep people trapped.” (p. 55)

 
And again on p. 85:
 

“Illiteracy, both in words and numbers, is the foundation of financial struggle. If people are having difficulties financially, there is something that they don’t understand, either in words or in numbers. The rich are rich because they are more literate in different areas than people who struggle financially. So if you want to be rich and maintain your wealth, it’s important to be financially literate, in words as well as numbers.“

 
Never mind his banally deplorable blaming-the-victim ethos. And we’ll also go ahead and ignore the systemic obstacles and inherent racial and class-based limitations that economically disadvantage tens of millions of people in America and elsewhere. Is it out of the question that Kiyosaki simply got lucky? Perhaps he made some good investing decisions early on that enabled him to acquire the kind of funds necessary to turn those initial profits into larger and larger profits. He even confesses to engaging in ultra high-risk plays initially:
 

“The stock plays I personally invested in were extremely high-risk for most people and absolutely not recommended. I have been playing that game since 1979 and have paid more than my share in dues. But if you will reread why investments such as these are high-risk for most people, you may be able to set your life up differently, so that the ability to take $25,000 and turn it into $1 million in a year is low-risk for you.” (p. 199)

 
That mileage will vary here should go without saying. And financial intelligence or no, a high-risk investment could bring a middling economic situation crashing down before your investing career gets off the ground. In such a situation, forking over twenty-five big ones to have another go isn’t in the cards, no matter how much self-help advice you imbibe over the course of the year.

Or, one could surmise, perhaps he rubbed elbows with the right folks who propelled him along the road to financial independence. One of his self-professed heroes is the “brash” Donald Trump, with whom he’s co-written a couple of books. (In a grand mix of irony and farcical flummery, Kiyosaki waxes poetic about how arrogance, which he ascribes to people who rarely read or listen to experts, is detrimental to wealth building, then name-drops Trump as a counter-example to which he aspires. That degree of delusion is priceless, regardless of the date of publication.)

He also takes frequent, irksome potshots at the value of education, though a charitable interpretation here is that Kiyosaki is lamenting how poorly universities prepare us for managing our finances. I heartily agree that personal finance should be a fundamental part of every young person’s education in order to help us navigate those more thorny adulting tasks such as obtaining a mortgage, managing a credit card, and investing in the stock market, CDs (certificates of deposit), government bonds, and other common financial instruments. Most millennials are sorely lacking in financial knowledge, and we could benefit greatly from acquiring this knowledge before it’s too late.

Finally, the author is just a generally poor writer, which to his credit, Kiyosaki freely and openly admits. This wouldn’t be nearly the problem that it is if the advice on offer was of broader utility and if it didn’t seem like the repetitiveness of it all was merely a ploy to cover up the thinness of the message. Alas, in the worst cases entire chapters seem to be retreads of earlier discussions. It’s even more galling because the exact words and phrasing are used each time a familiar point is raised, thereby avoiding even minimal contact with a thesaurus. And then of course there’s the hawking of his other books, seminars (which will run you as much as $5,000 a pop), and licensed board games, and the not-so-humble brags about his marketing prowess, which certainly doesn’t help with the conman vibe whatsoever.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, I won’t be recommending Rich Dad Poor Dad for those looking to escape the rat race of corporate America. Short on specifics, its focus is more on big picture concepts and gaining the right perspective on investing. It also feels cheap and gimmicky, not to mention mind-numbingly repetitive, and grounded in wish-fulfillment. Instead, I will recommend the following for their more comprehensive treatment of financial topics:

• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Investing by Joshua Kennon (2006)
• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren Buffett (1997)
• Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl by The Motley Fool (2011)
• Warren Buffett’s 3 Favorite Books by Preston George Pysh (2012)
• Beating the Street by Peter Lynch (1994)
• The Money Masters by John Train (1980)
• The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (1949)
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937)

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading:

• If I Were a Rich Dad: Why millions buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad’s nonsense.
• Robert Kiyosaki’s Ongoing Legal Dispute Says Everything About the Shadiness of Personal Finance Gurus

 
 
Finally, a book that captures the complexity of game development that anyone can pick up and enjoy. Jason Schreier of Kotaku spent two years traveling around the world to score in depth interviews with the industry’s most renowned gaming studios. Drawing from sources speaking both on and off the record, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels provides a rare glimpse into the pain and passion that go into bringing a modern video game to market. In ten absorbing chapters Schreier covers the downright grueling development process behind such hits as Blizzard’s Diablo III, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4, CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3 and, of course, Bungie’s Destiny.

Speaking of Destiny, it was Schreier’s crucial 2015 exposé that laid the groundwork for this wonderful little book. (Portions of his chapter on Destiny are taken directly from that article.) As fans of the blockbuster series will remember, that Kotaku piece brought Destiny‘s murky origin story to light. Importantly, it provided the necessary background for understanding how the company that gave us Halo could have produced — at least at launch — such a lackluster title. Subpar development tools, a strained relationship with publisher Activision, and the complete reboot of the story (following the departure of lead writer Joe Staten) a year out from release had much to do with it. As a source tells Schreier, “A lot of the problems that came up in Destiny 1…are results of having an unwavering schedule and unwieldy tools.”

What we learned then from Scheier’s keen reporting, and what comes across clear as day in his first book, is that making games is incredibly hard and almost impossibly demanding. Harder, perhaps, than any other creative medium. Thanks to their interactive nature and sheer potentiality, games are capable of delivering the boundless, memorable experiences we’ve come to love. But it’s those same elements that make them such a chore to create, even for seasoned veterans.

One of the designers at Obsidian (of Fallout: New Vegas fame) he interviews puts it this way: “making games is sort of like shooting movies, if you had to build an entirely new camera every time you started.” Indeed, the tools and technologies used to develop the latest games are constantly in flux, as is the creative vision of the producers and directors at the top. A change in either area can prove hugely disruptive to the overall process — one that hinges on pushing a marketable product out the door by an agreed upon deadline. It’s that constant give and take between concept and technology, between developer and publisher, that defines the medium.

Internal conflicts can also run a project off course. Artists and programmers might spend months, years even, sketching and coding characters, environments, quests, set pieces and combat mechanics, only to see it all thrown out as a result of higher-ups taking the game in an entirely different direction. When Naughty Dog replaced Uncharted 4‘s creative director Amy Hennig in 2014 — roughly two years into the game’s development — the story was more or less scrapped. That meant that cut scenes, animation, and thousands of lines of recorded voicework on which the studio had already spent millions of dollars got the axe, too. For an artist emotionally invested in their work, this can be heartbreaking and demotivating.

In other cases, such as the abortive Star Wars 1313, a decision by the publisher can bring it all crashing down. As Scheier recounts in the closing chapter, LucasArts, formerly a subsidiary of Lucasfilm, began work on a new action-adventure Star Wars game in 2010. The game debuted at E3 in 2012 to wide critical acclaim. Shortly afterward, the company was acquired by Disney. By 2013, Disney had shuttered the studio and canceled every one of its projects. For all the work the dedicated crew at LucasArts poured into their pet project, Star Wars 1313 was never meant to be.

Given the many technical hitches, logistical nightmares, corporate pressures, and unforeseen obstacles that threaten success, it’s no small wonder that any games are shipped at all. As Schreier points out, there’s hardly a game on the market today that doesn’t run up against insane crunch periods and dramatic setbacks over the course of its development. Whether it’s a small team working on a 2D side-scroller à la Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight or a massive effort spread across hundreds of staff in the case of BioWare’s Dragon Age, producing a quality game in today’s highly competitive environment is by any measure a herculean effort.

Virtually every insider consulted for the book talks about how taxing the job can be on one’s physical health and personal relationships. Burnout is common. And even with working around the clock for months on end — often sans overtime pay, as it’s not required in the U.S. — games rarely come out on time. Delays and cancellations are a feature, not a bug. To be sure, any successful career in game development is built on passion and an enthusiasm for creating unique playable spaces, but it comes with significant costs that only the truly dedicated may be equipped to endure.

Closing Thoughts

Leave it to Jason Schreier to shatter any utopic notions about game development. Behind the glossy visuals and destructible environments we take for granted on screen lies a hellish landscape of Sisyphean creative challenges and brutal working hours. As the title suggests, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels constantly reminds us that game production is as much about self-sacrifice as it is about crafting quality interactive experiences. And if these breezy oral histories are any indication, it’s a principle that holds true whether you’re a bootstrapped indie developer beholden to Kickstarter donors or a lowly cog in the big-budget corporate machine.

Schreier is a most welcome guide, bringing more casual readers up to speed on esoteric conversations ranging from rendering paths and game engines to bug testing and content iteration times. It’s a testament to his talents that the book never seems to flag, even when exploring games I didn’t particularly care about. While I wish Schreier had ventured deeper into the ethics of crunch culture, his penchant for meticulous, well researched investigative journalism is on full display here.

If you have even a passing interest in gaming be sure to pick this one up. I came away with a better understanding of the personal sacrifices and creative compromises that appear to go hand in hand with making video games, and a newfound perspective on increasingly commonplace monetization strategies like paid downloadable content (PDLC) and microtransaction (MTX) systems. Above all, it left me with a more profound appreciation for my most cherished hobby.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

 
 
Having read Gone Girl first, I decided to start at the beginning of Flynn’s (three-volume deep) catalog. Where the former spun a fiendish web of deceit and manipulation around a troubled marriage, Sharp Objects is a darker, more brooding tale that explores an earnestly neurotic mind, dysfunctional family dynamics, and small-town social structure through the medium of an unconventional mystery thriller. And I don’t mean dark as in Donnie Darko; I mean dark in the vein of We Need to Talk About Kevin (both of which are excellent films). It should also be mentioned that while Gone Girl is told via alternating perspectives of its two main characters, Sharp Objects is told entirely through the lens of a single protagonist.

(Note: Spoilers to follow. Stop reading here if you’ve not read the book.)

The setting is Wind Gap (a fictional town, not the actual one in PA), a sleepy, close-knit community in southern Missouri where two young girls have turned up dead, their teeth removed. With the killer(s) still on the loose, Camille Preaker, small-time reporter from Chicago, is tasked with returning to her hometown to cover the story. Wary of the sunless memories of her painful childhood that await her there, she reluctantly agrees; this could be the big break she — and her struggling paper — needs.

Camille is the reification of the tragic character. Her younger sister Marian died at a young age. She never knew her father. Her mother Adora, an eccentric and overbearing hypochondriac, she barely speaks to anymore. And, for some “deep-chemical” reason she’s powerless to explain, Camille’s also a cutter. Scrawled across her body in the form of conspicuous scar tissue are a series of words she’s carved into her skin since she was a teenager.
 

“I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words – cook, cupcake, kitty, curls – as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful.”

 
In order to carry out her assignment in Wind Gap, Camille must dredge up her unpleasant past by reuniting with her family and a community she no longer feels a part of without reopening old wounds. As the revelations of this eerie town bubble to the surface, Camille’s mental anguish and the struggle to keep her inner demons at bay conspire against her, threatening to break her in body and in spirit.

One trend or stereotype Flynn set out to crush, not just with this novel but in all of her writing, is the idea that women can’t be evil. That women are the victims and men the abusers. That women are the ones who react rather than instigate — that they can’t be the authors of destruction. In telling contrast, the women of Sharp Objects plot and scheme and hurt, until there is nothing left. They are villains in every sense of the word, and more dangerous yet than their male counterparts precisely because you never see them coming. As the Kansas City detective says repeatedly, “A woman just doesn’t fit the profile for these murders.”

Flynn unapologetically deracinates default expectations of the nurturing and empathic creature, twisting them into images shaped by violence, depravity and cruelty. In a later interview about the book, she expresses it this way:
 

“I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn’t necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn’t qualify either). I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves — to the point of almost parodic encouragement — we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids. So Sharp Objects is my creepy little bouquet.”

 
Much has been said about Adora and Amma — Camille’s half-sister, or as I like to call her, Little Miss Horrible — but can we talk about Alan for a moment? Adora’s nigh robotic husband is the lone question mark for me. Where was this wet-mop schmuck during all the ugliness unfolding before him? Did he not notice, in between his reading about horses and boats, anything amiss with either of the people living in the same house under the same roof? Surely he should have noticed a pattern of Adora’s “medications” and Amma’s health? He is the one to piece together what the doctors could not. Or Amma’s wildly antisocial tendencies? It is his daughter, after all. I see Alan as the lazy, apathetic soul who could have prevented much of this evil, but who stood by in blissful ignorance and watched it happen.

It’s been commonly said that Flynn grew as a writer between Sharp Objects and Gone Girl. However, I personally see little evidence of that here. I find her prose every bit as memorable, her metaphors just as clever, and the narrative as powerful in this offering as in her later works. Flynn is a seriously talented writer, with a knack for weaving macabre tales that leave a residue of darkness in their wake. Though she’s been heavily involved in film and television adaptations of late, including the upcoming Sharp Objects drama series on HBO starring Amy Adams, I trust there is much more to come from this brilliant mind.

Closing Thoughts

Any recommendations of this novel must be accompanied by a major trigger warning for depression, abuse and self-harm (in particular the self-harm component may turn some readers off). But assuming your psyche can handle the heavy contents, Sharp Objects is a thoroughly mesmerizing and unsettling novel that’s sure to appeal to thriller and mystery aficionados alike. The hard-hitting twists at the end are memorable in their own right, but what makes this story so gripping is less the whodunit aspect than watching unlikely heroine Camille wrestle with her emotional vulnerability and the visceral darkness at the heart of her family. Sharp Objects is filled with fierce and broken women whose penchant for destruction constantly toys with our intuitions.

Whether you grow to hate the characters or empathize with them, you’ll want to see their story to the end. Flynn writes with an infectious presence that worms its way under your skin. Her pitch-perfect descriptions lend such vividness to her narrative that I found myself pausing periodically to imagine the scene play out in front of me. And the way she lets slip intriguing details to be cashed out later makes for sustained reading sessions. (It took me all of three days to finish.) That this was her debut novel is a promising sign Flynn will keep us entertained for years to come.

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.