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ptune's review
4.0
doesn’t miss, although still varies in quality, like every other essay collection ever collected. Davis is at his best cohering world-size ideas into relatively granular material nuggets, and there are countless moments of startling, internationalist clarity in this collection. for example, regarding the interethnic gang warfare of nineties Los Angeles:
‘“Dios me salve Maria…” An old catholic custom, the same in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles as Palermo or Galway, it is a vigil kept by women, praying to another woman whose son was murdered two thousand years ago.’ (292)
the cosa nostra, the IRA, the midcity locos—it’s trite and reductive to compare specific gang wars like so much produce, but of course davis never falls into such simplifications, offering instead the insistent reminder that we require solidarity with each other to get out of any of this—all of this—and that we are not so far removed from one another as we might imagine.
‘“Dios me salve Maria…” An old catholic custom, the same in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles as Palermo or Galway, it is a vigil kept by women, praying to another woman whose son was murdered two thousand years ago.’ (292)
the cosa nostra, the IRA, the midcity locos—it’s trite and reductive to compare specific gang wars like so much produce, but of course davis never falls into such simplifications, offering instead the insistent reminder that we require solidarity with each other to get out of any of this—all of this—and that we are not so far removed from one another as we might imagine.
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