Dispatches from Dystopia
Dispatches from Dystopia

Author: Kate Brown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 022624282X

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“Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?” asks one chapter of Kate Brown’s surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montana—America’s largest environmental Superfund site—have much more in common than one would think thanks to similarities in climate, hucksterism, and the perseverance of their few hardy inhabitants. Taking readers to these and other unlikely locales, Dispatches from Dystopia delves into the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history. In Dispatches from Dystopia, Brown wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version—the real or the virtual—is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese-Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the annual male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the midwestern industrial rust belt to investigate the rise of “rustalgia” and the ways her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands. Dispatches from Dystopia powerfully and movingly narrates the histories of locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind.

Dispatches from Dystopia
Dispatches from Dystopia

Author: Kathryn L. Brown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-05

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 022624279X

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The author "wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version -- the real or the virtual -- is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the industrial rust belt, to investigate the rise of "rustalgia" and the ways her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands."--Jacket flap.

Welcome to Hell World
Welcome to Hell World

Author: Luke O'Neil

Publisher: OR Books

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1682192156

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When Luke O’Neil isn’t angry, he’s asleep. When he’s awake, he gives vent to some of the most heartfelt, political and anger-fueled prose to power its way to the public sphere since Hunter S. Thompson smashed a typewriter’s keys. Welcome to Hell World is an unexpurgated selection of Luke O’Neil’s finest rants, near-poetic rhapsodies, and investigatory journalism. Racism, sexism, immigration, unemployment, Marcus Aurelius, opioid addiction, Iraq: all are processed through the O’Neil grinder. He details failings in his own life and in those he observes around him: and the result is a book that is at once intensely confessional and an energetic, unforgettable condemnation of American mores. Welcome to Hell World is, in the author’s words, a “fever dream nightmare of reporting and personal essays from one of the lowest periods in our country in recent memory.” It is also a burning example of some of the best writing you’re likely to read anywhere.

Plutopia
Plutopia

Author: Kathryn L. Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0199855765

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In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today. -- From publisher description.

The Combing of History
The Combing of History

Author: David William Cohen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1994-06-25

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0226112780

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How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social, and political forces at play in the production of history. Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American commemorations, public and academic debates, and scholarly research, David William Cohen explores the "walls and passageways" between academic and non-academic productions of history.

Free to Die for Their Country
Free to Die for Their Country

Author: Eric L. Muller

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2003-05

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780226548234

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One of the Washington Post's Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001 In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.

The End
The End

Author: Hans Erich Nossack

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2004-12-15

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 0226595560

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The Inevitable
The Inevitable

Author: Katie Engelhart

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1250201470

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“A remarkably nuanced, empathetic, and well-crafted work of journalism, [The Inevitable] explores what might be called the right-to-die underground, a world of people who wonder why a medical system that can do so much to try to extend their lives can do so little to help them end those lives in a peaceful and painless way.”—Brooke Jarvis, The New Yorker More states and countries are passing right-to-die laws that allow the sick and suffering to end their lives at pre-planned moments, with the help of physicians. But even where these laws exist, they leave many people behind. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours—far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation. It also shines a light on the people who help them: loved ones and, sometimes, clandestine groups on the Internet that together form the “euthanasia underground.” Katie Engelhart, a veteran journalist, focuses on six people representing different aspects of the right to die debate. Two are doctors: a California physician who runs a boutique assisted death clinic and has written more lethal prescriptions than anyone else in the U.S.; an Australian named Philip Nitschke who lost his medical license for teaching people how to end their lives painlessly and peacefully at “DIY Death” workshops. The other four chapters belong to people who said they wanted to die because they were suffering unbearably—of old age, chronic illness, dementia, and mental anguish—and saw suicide as their only option. Spanning North America, Europe, and Australia, The Inevitable offers a deeply reported and fearless look at a morally tangled subject. It introduces readers to ordinary people who are fighting to find dignity and authenticity in the final hours of their lives.

Flavortown
Flavortown

Author: Danny Caine

Publisher:

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780578876344

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At FLAVORTOWN's core is a sequence of poems that imagines a place called, well, Flavortown, an American culinary dystopia where Guy Fieri is patron saint and everything is painfully delicious and "authentic." The book juxtaposes the dispatches from Flavortown with portraits of the real-life Midwest, in the process exploring fatherhood, masculinity, and nostalgia. "Because it is easy for me to get swept up and away in the joyously referential nature of this glorious book, let me first say that the writing in Flavortown is stunning. Touchable imagery, a playfulness and excitement around language that drew me in repeatedly. But, of course, I am also drawn to the world this book builds. A world of dairy queens and waffle houses. A stunning ode to the Midwest, a place more than worthy of such beauty." -Hanif Abdurraqib "People who say they don't like poetry need an order of Danny Caine and a side of fries. I guarantee they won't stop at one fry, at just one poem - because Danny Caine is the poet laureate of the fast-food joint, of the diner, of the almost-special occasion, of visits to Waffle House at 2 a.m., of the love and loss and hope people process as the Food Network plays on in the background of another day. His poems explore the real ingredients of lives, the humor, the gaucherie, and even the promise of grace: Danny Caine reminds us that grace is there, there - over by the Weinermobile. His poems always crackle your soul as they end - the grace is the sauce, the taste left on your tongue. I should probably add that Flavortown is also an appreciation of Guy Fieri - the loudest, cookingest, Donkey-Sauciest everyman around - and a gentle inquisition of him too - it is, sure, of course - but this book is much more than that. This book is a family meal. Pull up a seat." - Daniel A. Hoyt "Flavortown is a hilarious and unsettling dip into a hellacious society held hostage by a Willy-Wonkafied Guy Fieri. While the spiky-haired TV chef at the book's center is often lampooned, Caine asks readers to look past the flames and sunglasses, into the mystery of the man, his brand and empire. It's a wild carnival ride-only Caine could write a poetry collection that makes you feel like you're flying through a cloud of MSG down a highway strapped to the side of a donkey-sauce covered Wienermobile-and still, you'll walk away cradling your own heart in awe. For Caine is a poet who understands there is beauty, love, sadness, and humor to be found in everything from fatherhood and complicated heroes to the flashing neon lights of a chain restaurant calling you home." - Christopher Gonzalez