Home › Books › Health and Safety: A Breakdown
Health and Safety: A Breakdown
by
71/99
Critics' Rating Index
4/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
Volume of Reviews
74/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex ("introspective and breathtakingly honest"—New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her. In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City's dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020. Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.
Reviews
"n the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it's more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads."
"Witt...writes with such cool precision that it's hard to imagine her fully losing herself in sentimental projects, even with chemical assistance ..."
"Self-eviscerating, honest, often painful—a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age."
"Rather the book is about striving for all those states of being in a tumultuous, difficult, and violent period."
"Undergirding this professional dilemma, though, was a more relatable concern, which she renders in exacting and mournful prose: the evergreen search for a satisfying life in an unfeeling, chaotic country ..."
"The book offers little new insight about American politics or about Witt's reporting on it at the time for the New Yorker ..."
"But it's often unclear whether her intended audience sits outside of New York or if the book is primarily geared at denizens of Bushwick who attended the same parties around the same time ..."
"he attempts to capture, through memoir, sociology, and a kind of club ethnography, the many meanings and embodied states of a night out, while also situating them in an evolving subculture ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!