An underground party memoir; an argument for nonhuman life.
Dear readers,
For reasons that need not be stated, here are two books that represent an alternative to the pace of the news. Enjoy at whatever speed suits you.
—Molly
“Health and Safety: A Breakdown,” by Emily Witt
Nonfiction, 2024
When I say this book is breathtaking, I am not trotting out a metaphor; it really did alter my respiration! Sometimes in the direction of excited quickening, other times toward a sorrowful (temporary) arrest. “Health and Safety” is a memoir in the form of fieldwork; its topic is a specific pre-pandemic party scene in New York that revolved around music, dance, sex, design and consciousness-altering drugs.
Witt, a staff writer at The New Yorker, takes pleasure seriously in a way that few contemporary American writers do. The book laces strands of history and brain chemistry and auto-anthropology into her account of a lapsed fairyland — a smattering of clubs and illegal venues in 2010s Brooklyn that attracted people who were keen on losing their minds in a specifically connoisseurial way.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
