Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads Book

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars The moaning of the plagued privileged is not a pretty sound., March 9, 2009
By Alexandra Henshel - See all my reviews
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Gimme Shelter: Ugly Houses, Cruddy Neighborhoods, Fast-Talking Brokers and Toxic Mortgages: My Three Years Searching For The American Dream is the whole overblown title, which promises much more than is delivered in this surprisingly weightless book.

For 310 pages, Williams moans with the dreadfully self-conscious tone of the plagued priviliged, and it is not a pretty sound.

The book is not, as implied, a look at the greater collapse of the American housing industry or what have you- it is a great whine about how she (freelance writer for publications such as Salon) and her husband Jeff (on-and-off employed copy editor) couldn't afford to buy in Brooklyn's Carrol Gardens during the housing boom.

Considering that they had lived there for years before prices skyrocketed, it seems rather sour grapes of her how much she bitches and squeaks about those friends of theirs who did buy early and made mad money from their foresight, and what she has to say about those dreadful new rich people who priced her out of what she clearly felt was rightfully her cool neighborhood- well, you can practically see her stamping her little feet.

She did have the grace to realize, close to the end of the book, that what she and Jeff were doing by buying and tarting up a place in way way uptown Manhattan (Inwood) was the same thing the wealthy were doing in Carroll Gardens- gentrification, lady. The rock stars priced you out of your neighborhood, now you're doing it to the residents of Inwood Park, the immigrants and the elderly.

I grow weary of these- The House on First Street, about the terrible agonies of restoring one's mansion in post-Katrina New Orleans, Not Buying It, (incidentally also set in smug-as-hell Brooklyn) about the fearsome self-denial it took not to recreationally shop for a year, Bitter is the New Black, whose loathsome author memorably carried a Prada bag to the unemployment office...

In times of such turbulence, it's a turnoff.