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A review by lajacquerie
We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik
2.0
Man, I was so excited when I picked up this book. Its premise is that it takes 5 central myths (the myth of political correctness, the myth of harmful identity politics, the myth of national exceptionalism, etc) and it will deconstruct them, including the most common tools/arguments that their proponents use to continue propagating them.
I'm on board with what Malik is saying here and find many of her key points unassailable—the "political correctness" debate is largely manufactured; when you get down to it, ALL politics are identity politics, and much positive progress has come from identity politics; and our sense of national identity (in the United States) is a deeply flawed and myopic/cherry-picked thing. It just didn't feel like much new was brought to the debate, or that a historical "tail" was even drawn up for most of these arguments. It's a slim book (with most of its citations coming from web articles), and perhaps if Malik had more time she could have given it more heft; then again, as a journalist, maybe her strength is in shorter pieces. Less than I'd hoped for was shared about how to unravel these myths or counteract the tools employed to keep them going.
Great, necessary idea for a book. Was hoping for better content, in the end.
I'm on board with what Malik is saying here and find many of her key points unassailable—the "political correctness" debate is largely manufactured; when you get down to it, ALL politics are identity politics, and much positive progress has come from identity politics; and our sense of national identity (in the United States) is a deeply flawed and myopic/cherry-picked thing. It just didn't feel like much new was brought to the debate, or that a historical "tail" was even drawn up for most of these arguments. It's a slim book (with most of its citations coming from web articles), and perhaps if Malik had more time she could have given it more heft; then again, as a journalist, maybe her strength is in shorter pieces. Less than I'd hoped for was shared about how to unravel these myths or counteract the tools employed to keep them going.
Great, necessary idea for a book. Was hoping for better content, in the end.