'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE 'Endlessly absorbing.' SIN�AD GLEESON 'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON 'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILL A personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the New York Times bestselling author. Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is Having and Being Had: a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. Playfully ranging ...
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'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE 'Endlessly absorbing.' SIN�AD GLEESON 'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON 'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILL A personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the New York Times bestselling author. Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is Having and Being Had: a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyonc� to Pok�mon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, 'In what have we invested? 'As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight . . . Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears . . . In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display . . . if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.' AMINATTA FORNA, GUARDIAN 'Calls on the controlled rush of poetry and turns experience into art.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Nuanced . . . Biss' sentences have retained a poet's precision.' IRISH TIMES 'Eula Biss's prescient new book gave me new language for things I didn't know I felt . . . A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us.' ALEXANDER CHEE 'No contemporary writer I know explores and confronts her own societal responsibilities better than Eula Biss.' ALEKSANDER HEMON 'A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems.' JEET THAYIL
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"I wondered as I was writing this book, what it was I was writing. Was it a collection of poems? An essay in episodes? A series of jokes made at my own expense? A high-stakes game? A midlife crisis? An internal audit? Was it, like Cyril Connolly's book *The Unquiet Grave* ' an experiment in dismantling'?"
This book truly defies categorization! I am not one to *love* money focused books, which when you start reading you might think this is. With a good 20 pages of notes(the last one of which is partially quoted above) and works cited, Eula Biss has broken down a history of consumerism and made it accessible to folks like me, and as I zoomed through it in one day it just blew me away. Not since Hannah Arendt's *Work and Labor* have I been this excited by a book of this type. I already have my first top book of the year and it's right here! Highly Recommended 5/5
[disclaimer: I received this book from an outside source. It was my choice to read and review it]
