An impassioned, intense reckoning with American gun violence… Paul Auster, one of America’s most distinguished, prolific and inventive writers … moves between argumentation, memoir, statistics, field notes, poetry, suspenseful narrative and Whitmanesque lists of shootings, deaths and trauma to confront the reader anew with the ‘gunk and gore and horror’ of American gun violence.” Times Literary Supplement
“[Bloodbath Nation is] remarkably powerful…Accompanying Auster’s sobering, impassioned plea are haunting black-and-white photographs taken by Spencer Ostrander.” –Alex Kotlowitz in the Washington Post
“Auster’s book is exactly what is needed at this time.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
“The stories Auster shares belong to every American […] Ostrander contributes forty-one images, each in its way as riveting as Auster’s text. Why? Because all of us living in America have been there: that supermarket aisle, that sidewalk, that classroom. We are all going there today. This, of course—as the author recognizes—is the crux of the matter, that we are the problem we cannot solve. The power of Auster’s book is that it never blinks in articulating this dilemma, that it doesn’t let anybody off the hook. Gun violence in the United States is a collective problem, after all—which also means, as Bloodbath Nation argues so compellingly, that it is a collective responsibility.”—David Ulin, 4Columns.org
“[A] powerful look at the causes and consequences of gun violence in America…. For Auster, who casts doubt on the likelihood of judicial or legislative remedies, the end to the gun debate will only occur when ‘both sides want it, and in order for that to happen, we would first have to conduct an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we are and who we want to be as a people going forward into the future.’ This trenchant account goes a long way toward making that possible.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Exceptional in its clarity and arresting in its sense of urgency… A harrowing, haunting reflection on the routine slaughter wrought by guns.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“A rigorous and evocative grappling with mass tragedies in this time of 'furious discord.'”—Booklist
“An anguished cry of bafflement at this country’s obsession for guns… deals with the societal consequences of sacrificing thousands of lives.” —Library Journal
“Deft and dogged and entirely too contemplative to be a screed… Accounts of [Auster’s] personal experience with guns merge with sociological observations and a partial inventory of mass shootings in the U.S… Will the message of Bloodbath Nation reverberate outside the echo chamber of Auster's fellow gun-control advocates? [Auster’s] generally measured tone makes it seem possible.”—Shelf Awareness
12/01/2022
Novelist Auster ("The New York Trilogy") writes an anguished cry of bafflement at this country's obsession for guns; it's not a call to regulate or ban certain types of firearms. Although Auster has never owned a gun, he became a skilled marksman by the age of 10. He learned firsthand how a single act of gun violence can start a generational collapse of family when his grandmother murdered his grandfather. But his personal history goads him to ask, why does society accept approximately 40,000 deaths a year—half of them by suicide—from guns? To answer that, the author examines how these shootings grow out of the combined psyche of U.S. Americans, the cowboy mythos, endless fictional violence on television, and the politicians who use fear to distort reality. He also traces the racial history of the United States and how it's translated into widespread violence. VERDICT Not a comfortable read but rather a work that deals with the societal consequences of sacrificing thousands of lives. Ideal for libraries with collections on both gun control and sociology.—Edwin Burgess
★ 2022-11-07
The acclaimed novelist lays out how America became a nation terrorized by personal weaponry.
In this brief but remarkably moving work, Auster blends personal and historical commentary, anecdotal and statistical evidence, sober analysis, and passionate appeals for reform, sketching the origins and present reality of American gun violence. Early in the book, he reveals a disturbing secret: When his father was 6 years old, his grandmother deliberately shot and killed his grandfather in an act attributed to temporary insanity. Auster suggests that this tragedy and its ramifying trauma might be viewed as broadly and uncannily representative of modern American life, where such violence has been normalized by its frequency. The author remains both sensible and compelling in his commentary as he notes the divisiveness of efforts at gun control, and he skillfully summarizes the reasoning and emotional commitments of both pro- and anti-gun activists. His outline of the nation’s historical relationship with guns is astute and memorable, and he persuasively assesses the sociopolitical roots of the “right to bear arms,” the ideological impacts of long-term conflicts with Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans, and the strange oscillations of outrage and complacency that define contemporary responses to mass shootings. Though Auster’s arguments will be familiar to anyone who has followed gun control debates closely, the author’s overview is exceptional in its clarity and arresting in its sense of urgency. The book includes a series of photographs by Ostrander, each of them absent of human figures or any overt suggestion of traumatic events—caption: “Safeway supermarket parking lot. Tucson, Arizona. January 8, 2011. 6 people killed; 15 injured (13 by gunfire).” The photos document the sites of mass shootings and provoke, like the text, disquieting confrontations with the nation’s transformation of all private and public settings into potential sites of violence.
A harrowing, haunting reflection on the routine slaughter wrought by guns.
