Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
6 reviews
effievee's review against another edition
4.5
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
literategirl's review
5.0
Moderate: Rape, Violence, Sexual assault, and Gun violence
tiagoalves's review against another edition
1.25
The blurb, that I read a few years ago, drew me in. Its first chapter, describing loneliness as a city in itself and beginning to explore that feeling in a city as born out of separation but also exposure was fantastic. Then Laing went into the biographical content that mostly built this book, rather than the memoir I was expecting alongside the study of loneliness in art.
We learn about the lives of Hopper, Warhol, Wojnarowicz, Solanas, Darger, and so on, but what we read is all very surface-level. It goes on interminable tangents that don’t seem to relate at all with the main point the book promises us, only then to fail miserably in considering the many nuances of loneliness, cowering solely behind the word ‘lonely’ and never having the boldness to explore anything else for over 250 pages.
This was researched, but the thing is that you can tell it was researched, and not in a good way. It reads as if Laing had googled ‘lonely’ and ‘new york’ and created an amalgamation of the results and divided them into chapters. The art analysis is paradoxically shallow and generic, while also being over-explained and too drawn out.
The problem is that Laing seems to promise to set out in one direction through the main road, but she chooses to go someplace else and uses a shortcut. She pours over an artist’s life for over 30 pages and then suddenly remembers “oh right, I have to relate this to loneliness and to me somehow” so she decides to say “this is why he was lonely and this is the same way I felt a few years after in the same street where he was once” and then dips. These short allusions to loneliness and to her own experience quickly started to feel like a cop out from actually reflecting on loneliness by herself—she resorted a bit too much to quotes from her sources and ended up not sharing much more than her generic, vague, and not too bound opinions.
Shout out to chapter six, which dealt with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, for being the best chapter in the book, but it couldn’t save this book.
Graphic: Death, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Terminal illness, Sexual violence, Gun violence, Violence, Addiction, Alcoholism, Blood, Child abuse, Confinement, and Drug abuse
Moderate: Suicide attempt, Domestic abuse, Rape, Bullying, and Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Abandonment
clarabooksit's review against another edition
Graphic: Drug abuse, Homophobia, Mental illness, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Sexism, Misogyny, and Addiction
Moderate: Gun violence, Violence, Rape, Sexual violence, and Bullying
maureen's review
2.75
Minor: Addiction, Mental illness, Homophobia, Gun violence, Drug use, Drug abuse, Domestic abuse, and Chronic illness
julied's review
3.0
Moderate: Drug use, Emotional abuse, Grief, Gun violence, Medical content, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Rape, and Sexual content
Minor: Addiction