If Books Could Kill
@ifbookspod.bsky.social
32K followers
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89 posts
A podcast about the airport books that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.
Patreon: patreon.com/ifbookspod
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Meg Rowley
@megrowler.fangraphs.com
· Aug 21
Reposted by If Books Could Kill
![Williams’s book is impaired by slapdash prose. His writing abounds with interminable, convoluted sentences that teem with digressions and then awkwardly limp toward disorienting conclusions. Here is one from the prologue:
For non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database) — and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights movement — the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael] Brown (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media, thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama’s second administration.
Huh? In addition to such passages, “Summer of Our Discontent” includes many distended excerpts — some spanning three pages — from not-so-obscure sources, including The Times.
Midway through the book, Williams chides another writer on the race beat for propounding “an excruciatingly simplistic tale, fueled by a powerful unwillingness and incapacity to grapple with contemporary American racial and social complexity.” Regrettably, I know the feeling.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nvfposmpmhegtyvhbs75s3pw/bafkreif2e52q5ncyrgmcxrrhpwuuclwcfp2vefdlmqxka6z5p2brfiarsa@jpeg)
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The Next Day
@incompetusrex.bsky.social
· Jul 28
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Reposted by If Books Could Kill
Reposted by If Books Could Kill
Jamie Bear 🐻
@jamiebear.bsky.social
· Jul 18
Reposted by If Books Could Kill
Reposted by If Books Could Kill
Reposted by If Books Could Kill