Dan

Self-Loathing: A Novel

Revisado: 06-20-18

This book is a monument to self hatred. In the guise of offering commentary on the emptiness of gay bro life, it is instead a bleak screed that can’t stand apart from its subject for even a second. It’s the feel-bad book of the summer without any real point of view beyond a sort of childish nihilism.

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Almost painful to listen to

Revisado: 09-24-15

What would have made The Triangle Fire, Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York better?

1. Substance - The author's source material clearly drives the narrative here, such that he almost never comes up for air to give us a sense of the bigger picture. Giant sections of the book read like minutes of meetings, with names and positions and organizations (easily forgotten) that lack analysis or argument that might give them a framework.

2. Narrator. Seriously terrible, almost funny reader. Dull and pedantic.

What was most disappointing about Richard Greenwald’s story?

There is this great potential in the beginning, where Greenwald lays out the garment industry , the system of sweating labor, some of the details of exploitation in the factory that give a glimmer of vitality... and then we disappear into long, boring chapters on who led which organization, names and dates and such that are a stereotype of history as mere facts, rather than a discipline that makes and substantiates arguments, illustrates scenes, and analyses facts with engaging scrutiny.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Tom Kruse?

Almost anyone else.

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All style, little substance

Revisado: 09-06-15

What disappointed you about The Job?

Osborne's charm as storyteller and performer aren't enough to carry what is honestly a thin set of stories.

In full disclosure, I am one of the "liberals" Osborne loves to chide throughout his stories, and, in fact, I work in criminal defense. I bought this book because I wanted to listen and hear how Osborne sees and deals with the conflicts that accompany police work, and I was ready to take him and his viewpoint seriously. While his voice and stories are truly unique, Osborne comes off as a less-than-credible storyteller, and left me feeling like some of my worst fears about his profession might be true.

To begin, Osborne is not a reflective narrator. He dismisses people who criticize police work as "liberals" without addressing their viewpoint and considering their arguments against the kinds of tactics Osborne describes using throughout the book. Osborne's credibility would improve tremendously if he aired these issues and reflected upon them even a little bit, and his failure to do so makes me doubt so many of his impressions and conclusions about other characters in his stories.

I know Osborne isn't writing as a policy spokesman, but even the storyteller has to give his or her characters with some dimension to appear reliable. Can we believe his accounts that his use of force was always justified when he doesn't ever consider that the opposite might be true? Can we trust his impression that onlookers to some of his arrests are only acting out of anti-cop sentiment when he doesn't acknowledge the possibility of other motives? He goes so far as to refer to people in Tompkins Square Park as "subhumans" who go around making "crack babies" - how are we to trust a man with that outlook to tell us these stories, let alone protect public safety?

The book is clearly a set of stories written to stand alone. To Osborne's editor, I would recommend watching out for repetitive sidebars that Osborne uses in multiple stories, which work fine when the stories stand alone but looks sloppy when presented multiple times in the same book. It's an easy fix that would make the book flow better.

Osborne is at his best when describing characters whom he can endow with real depth and whose emotional universe he can open up for readers. His story about his father's death does this especially well, and I credit him for a touching story that shows his capabilities as a writer far better than some of his cop stories.

Osborne is also great at describing the nuts and bolts of police work - how things work, how cops run a big investigation, how he thinks about documenting evidence. These things don't get sacrificed during the excitement of a story, and that speaks of promising ability to move between registers.

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