CRASH!

Reviews / Votes

Malamud's Crash! is a high flying, acrobatic, daring, jet-propelled analysis of aviation disasters in art, literature, poetry, music, and real life. It's a definitive, obsessive, sometimes even fetishistic investigation into what happens when things go wrong in the skies. An in-depth humanist study of a common nightmare, Crash! is the cultural black box of plane crash residue. * Mikita Brottman, author of Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahasee, Florida (2024) * Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise includes a cameo role for air disasters, as spectacular phenomena rife with postmodern irony. Randy Malamud takes DeLillo's gambit seriously, and even further, discovering a debris field fecund with vibrant remains and littered with the spent meanings of modernity. This book focuses intently on the quasi-taboo subject of plane crashes, as if intellectually willing one of our fastest forms of human travel to slow down and move in freeze frame beneath a careful, analytic lens. While no one asked for an earnest guide to this grisly realm, Malamud has nevertheless volunteered for the job, and carries it out with critical aplomb. * Christopher Schaberg, Director of Public Scholarship, Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports (Bloomsbury, 2011) * Filled with the harrowing and the mundane, CRASH! takes us on the wildest of rides. From stories of suicidal pilots, debris fields, and crash site memorials to examinations of pop music lyrics, folktales about flight, and kamikaze death poems, Malamud provides us with a stunning pre- and post-mortem of crashing. Who knew, for example, that Paula Abdul faked a crash story to gain a new measure of notoriety? That Roald Dahl's literary career was propelled by surviving a plane crash? Or, that hundreds of artworks by the likes of Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Cindy Sherman, held in private corporate collections, became so much debris when planes took down the World Trade Center Towers? Ultimately, in Malamud's hands, air tragedy is turned over and over again, until it's revealed to be more sublime than we could ever imagine. * Mark Yakich, Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University New Orleans, USA *