Gabbert draws masterly portraits of the precise, uncanny affects that govern our psychological relationship to calamity — from survivor’s guilt to survivor’s elation, to the awe and disbelief evoked by spectacles of destruction, to the way we manage anxiety over impending dangers. Even more impressive is her skill at bending crisp, clear language into shapes that illustrate the shifting logic of the disastrous, keeping the reader oriented amid continual upheaval.

The novelist Walker Percy once asked, 'Why do people driving around on beautiful Sunday afternoons like to see bloody automobile wrecks?' With this simple question, Percy reveals the depth of human malaise. We seek the bloody in the beautiful and savor the gratifying and self-satisfied thrill of knowing we ourselves have momentarily escaped the suffering of the accident. In her absolutely stunning collection of essays, The Unreality of Memory, which is part medical and psychological sleuthing and part memoir, Elisa Gabbert takes up Percy’s question and places it in our current cultural context.

Gabbert wrote these essays before the coronavirus pandemic, but the somber conclusions she draws from past disasters can be easily applied to our current emergency.

Gabbert’s descriptions of the human failure to grasp climate change in all its dimensions end up being a far better aid to apprehending it. They are not, however, likely to rouse anyone to action. 'Big and Slow' is typical of Gabbert’s disaster essays in that its bent is deterministic.

In a world that has been rocked in 2020 alone by a pandemic and racial violence, Gabbert’s essays feel incredibly relevant, dipping into epidemiology, othering, and compassion fatigue.

In this deeply contemplative but accessible essay collection, poet Gabbert...considers how accurately people perceive themselves and the world around them.

To frame her inquiry, [Gabbert] divides the book into three parts, the first about disaster (human-made and otherwise), the second about memory and self-perception, and the last about exhaustion and social conditioning. Her questing, restless intelligence is what holds the essays together.