Review: A Very Poignant Read
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 6, 2012
As a native of the wounded Apple, I don't relish the idea of revisiting that terrifying day or the overwhelming grief that followed it, but an outsider's perspective can often be cathartic, as is the case with Dissolute Kinship. With his beautiful prose, David Antrobus takes us along on an already-planned trip that most sane people would've cancelled given the early news of that tragic day. I'm glad he didn't. His empathetic observations of us New Yorkers in our raw pain, our eerie dust-covered silence and also in our brief moments of almost-normal joy displayed on a Brooklyn stoop are vivid, but also somehow comforting in its heartbreaking overtones that for me, felt like recognition of kin. The author's own PTSD commingled with the fresh trauma we'd just experienced and by the end of his journey, we feel a sense of tentative peace. Even more than that, the author turns his scope even wider so that we're forced to revisit other painful memories of shocking global brutality that occurred long before 9/11 and asks the vital, eternal question: Have these events really changed us at all?