Book review: Flint represents “domestic terrorism,” “state-sponsored violence” in America at War with Itself
By Robert R. Thomas In his penetrating new book, America at War with Itself (City Lights Books, 2017), Henry A. Giroux devotes an early chapter to the Flint water crisis, asserting that it epitomizes a menacing “new authoritarianism” and contends that what happened here was “an act of state sponsored violence.” His Chapter Four, “Poisoned City: Flint and the Specter of Domestic Terrorism,” opens with a...
Book Review: NOBODY: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
By Robert R. Thomas In the January 2016 issue of EVM, I wrote a book review of Demolition Means Progress (2015) by Andrew Highsmith, a definitive account of the reality of Flint’s last 80 years. The book arrived in my life at a time when I desperately needed to understand the Flint I had returned to in 2005. Eleven years later life in Flint has come to a new bend in the river where I needed to reflect and review. Where had we come...
Fluttered away like a pack of cards: reflections on Alice in Wonderland and adulthood
By Teddy Robertson When I was about eight years old I was very sick with a fever that must have been unusually high. What caused it or what my mother and grandmother surmised it might be, I don’t remember now. But I was in bed in a dark room, restless and confused. The family prescription was that I needed to sleep, sleep being the general cure-all in household pediatric advice, circa 1953. But domestic illness lore also warned that...
Book Review: Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew Highsmith
By Robert R. Thomas Like a twisted love affair in which things are not what they seem, living in Flint can be an extremely disorienting hall of mirrors. For 10 years I have been researching Flint’s history, trying to understand my hometown roots and my current residence. Despite having read most of the major books on the subject, my Flint narrative has remained littered with black holes between disconnected tissue. I had more...
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