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65
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
77/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Teju Cole
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Date:
October 27, 2021
Celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole meditates on what it means to keep our humanityâand witness the humanity of othersâin a time of political and social darkness. In these essays, he ponders migration, Italian art, the late scholar and activist Edward Said, the nature of photography and many other cultural artifacts and ideas.
What The Reviewers Say
... astonishing.
This collection of Cole’s feels rawer and more personal than those that have come before...layering as it does his art essays with homages to lost friends and analysis of his own 2012 novel, Open City. There are moments when the self-citation begins to feel self-indulgent or when the highbrow tips into the merely pretentious.
While there is nothing else here that quite matches the stylistic brilliance and visceral thrust of that opening essay, Cole’s writing throughout hums with a quiet intensity and sometimes a palpable anger at the inhumanity he witnesses on his travel.
Meditative and complex, the collection also plays with the essay form. There are works within works.
