Reviews tagging 'Medical trauma'

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

4 reviews

effievee's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Chronic illness, Mental illness, Gun violence, Violence, Drug use, Terminal illness, Injury/Injury detail, Drug abuse, Grief, Medical content, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Medical trauma, Pedophilia, and Sexual violence

Moderate: Addiction, Alcohol, Rape, Racial slurs, Self harm, Alcoholism, Racism, and Classism

savvylit's review

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

"...The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself."

Where The Lonely City excels is in its biographical portraits of lonely artists. Beginning with Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, Laing also compassionately portrays the lives of two lesser-known artists: Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz. Laing's continued discussion of loneliness' relationship to these artists' creativity and community is extremely fascinating. The Lonely City constantly pushes readers to consider all the ways that someone can feel lonely or ostracized - even in a densely populated urban setting. Using the four aforementioned artists, she creates a very moving meditation on cultural normativity and it's inexorable connection to loneliness.

All that being said, I do think this book was a tad bloated. Like Laing's own walks around New York City described in this book, The Lonely City is quite meandering. I think this book would have benefited from focusing purely on biography and drawing conclusions from the artists' lives. However, Laing injects several random-seeming mentions of her own life which throw off the overall flow. For instance, she mentions a devastating breakup that she experienced - and then never discusses it again. I know it's definitely more than possible to weave personal anecdotes into biography. But in the case of The Lonely City, it is just not well-executed

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Homophobia, Medical trauma, Violence, Emotional abuse, Hate crime, Terminal illness, Death, and Sexual assault

ohlhauc's review

emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

A clear and emotional look at loneliness from different angles, with a focus on its expression through the telling of four artists working in New York through the mid- and late- twentieth century - Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger. There is also a bit of memoir as the author discusses her own relationship with loneliness while living in New York, but the memoir element definitely takes a back seat to the social commentary, art criticism, and author profiles.

One of the strongest parts is that the art criticism is accessible so you don't need to know a lot about art, especially art and photography, to understand the commentary. The author guides the reader by not only explaining the works but also their context and impact. Another strong part is how the author continued to define loneliness with deeper levels of meaning rather than relying on one definition, and doing so by looking at other forces like privilege, oppression, class structures, stigma, and more. You won't see much discussion on mental health, which was an element that I felt was missing, but the other social forces were compelling, especially during the sections on forced institutionalization and the AIDS epidemic.

If you're interested in art criticism, in books about the AIDS epidemic, in loneliness in general, or how society can fail people who are different - this book is for you.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Forced institutionalization, Grief, Homophobia, Medical trauma, and Terminal illness

julied's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Drug use, Emotional abuse, Grief, Gun violence, Medical content, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Rape, and Sexual content

Minor: Addiction