Reviews and Comments

Oil Beach is a remarkable example of how STS (science & technology studies) can engage with what is wondrous about the world while offering rigorous sociopolitical critique. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are a global nexus for oil production and trade. Christina Dunbar-Hester employs the concept of infrastructural vitalism to explore how LA port and shipping infrastructure is constructed as the living heart of the city's role in the global economy even as it destroys, suppresses, and commodifies organic life. In addition to readers who are working in the field or interested in the topic, I think scholars or writers with wide-ranging intellectual curiosity who are wondering how to make their interests connect fluidly in a single book will find Oil Beach valuable.

This short interview with the author gives a glimpse of what to expect.

I don't know why I read the entire book. It mostly reads like Walmart propaganda, and then in the last few pages Rick Wartzman points out that every US worker needs to earn at least $20 an hour these days.

The Women of Brewster Place is a set of interconnected short stories about the lives of Black women on a single urban block in an unnamed city. Through these stories, Gloria Naylor also narrates the arc of racialized US urban development and decay from the 1910s through the late '70s/early '80s.

Normally I'm really into the style of women's social realist melodrama in which Naylor writes. There are some great sentences, dialogue, and imagery throughout these stories. The best parts are those in which Black women's love and care for each other shine through, as well as the moments where Naylor seems to be offering gentle critique from a loving position. But throughout the book, the overtones are of suffering and punishment, and sometimes Naylor seems to verge into moral condemnation. The stories are harsher on individual Black women (and sometimes men) than on the structures that proscribe their lives. It was hard for me to tell whom this book is for.