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Health and Safety: A Breakdown
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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
"Does not attempt to define stability, health, or safety."
"The double-edged title notwithstanding, Witt's bleakly brilliant book is about a time when both health and safety are rare—and getting rarer."
"Even spaces where truly crazy stuff happens are, in Health and Safety, denuded of much narrative interest in favor of the party line that they produce a subcultural community organized not just around hedonism but 'the music, too' ..."
"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 ..."
"Her journey of self-discovery dovetailed with an existential crisis about her career in journalism, which earned her increasing stability and prestige but fell far short of changing the world."
"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."
"As important as Andrew was for her, exactly what it was that made him such an enthralling presence is never quite conveyed ..."
"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 ..."
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