The new book What’s the Matter with White People? falls prey to the desire for clever/provocative titles that don’t necessarily have much to do with the subject matter at hand; it’s not quite the racial jeremiad that one might imagine. My review is up now at PopMatters:
Salon editor-at-large and MSNBC analyst Joan Walsh grew up a working-class Irish Catholic on Long Island in the ‘60s, with plenty of cops and firemen and construction workers in her extended family. It was a good vantage point to study what she terms the “destruction” of that decade. Walsh was perched on the verge of a rapidly imploding city, surrounded by relatives who fled the boroughs’ increasing crime. She uses her relatives as examples of what were once termed “white ethnics”, taking shelter from the societal chaos in the assurance of something that felt more concrete and protecting than the wispy liberalism that they blamed for it all. In other words: Nixon…
What’s the Matter with White People? is now available in finer bookstores everywhere.
My review of the new film of Wuthering Heights is up now at PopMatters:
From the second that it was announced Andrea Arnold was adapting Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, might have guessed that hers would be no ordinary costume drama. Arnold’s previous features, the bracing Red Road (2006) and unforgettable Fish Tank (2009), both mined a seam of bleak UK council estate angst via raw performances. The new film is similarly tough.
Arnold has not “modernized” the original text or packed it with appeals to the tween set, a la Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations or Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. Instead, she deploys her signature dramatic style, casting some unknown and scintillating actors, such that the film has a sandpaperish honesty that is true to Bronte’s messy source novel…
Wuthering Heights is playing now in limited release and should be expanding to several cities over the next few weeks.
Chris Barsanti 
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