Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Though linear, this is a collection of largely unconnected musings on culture and ideological conflict which never themselves directly address politics and policy, whatever legacy boutique media and the organic wine-and-cheese critical establishment say (or spastically shriek) about Ellis' latest work, though there is a common and unifying thread running through it: opinions are not facts, facts may rely on unclear or nuanced variables for interpretation, and it's possible to manage social disagreement and dissent about opinions and factual ambiguity without becoming hysterically unhinged. Despite his rather tame and visibly true thesis, and his patently obvious anti-Trump disposition, Ellis has nevertheless spent the last week weathering exactly the sort of predictable, phony and overwrought establishment propaganda his text bemoaned. In doing so, I wish he'd delved into the substantive quibbles of our contemporary policy arguments, though it's beside the point of the work, as it would've fleshed out more fully how fake and ridiculous this culture and its corporate minders have become. The cheapest of the shots taken at Ellis in the wake of White was a phone interview with The New Yorker, which began with and was entirely predicated on the fiction that Trump had ever said, "Mexicans are rapists," (words he has in fact never uttered) and Ellis deflected (instead of confronting his interrogator with the truth of the matter), effectively replying that this text is not about sound bite/news cycle politics itself, but the broader cultural atmosphere in which those sound bites and distortions and outright lies exist, perhaps in his reply meta-framing this very issue, and he was dealt with as all critics of legacy media are dealt with, and—I'm sure—precisely as he expected: by being falsely painted as a Trump apologist. It would then follow that Noam Chomsky is the greatest Trump apologist who ever lived. Interwoven among these riffs on aesthetic and ideological conflict (yet still necessarily relating to those themes) is a fair amount of interesting biographical data, a large part of which was not publicly known or confirmed until White was published: the writer and what created him, the person inside that writer, the celebrity projected over that person and his paradoxical loathing of and obsession with the celebrity cult of youth and beauty, the events and artifacts that pushed him this way or that to write on this theme or that topic, inspiration and creativity, the pith and meaning and purpose of art and music and literature, real and true liberty as a precondition of any meaningful creative act (including the freedom to screw up, to fail utterly, to be wrong, to anger an already-angry feminist, to find pain and loss), and these strands of twinned personal narrative and shared social history all somehow ultimately lead into this horrible, boring, technocratic, dystopic and utterly fascist present that seems dead-set on annihilating those circumstances, the very things needed to create a culture worth having. White is essential reading for any fan of Ellis and his work, and instructive for anyone else trapped in this bland corporate media hellhole who somehow has no knowledge of him.