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This City Is a Minefield

By Aaron Chan (Signal 8 Press,2019)

$24.75 | 249 pp

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Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the current vogue for memoirs has appeared during the age of the selfie and other artifacts of internet-enabled self regard.

We seem to have limitless appetite for first-person accounts of lives lived, and as a perceptive article in The Guardian recently noted, this appetite is by no means limited to lives of celebrities.

As the epidemic of alienation and anomie that is such a troubling feature of 21st-century life continues to rage, we are hungry for at least the illusion of intimacy with other people who share our non-celebrity status.

At their best, such memoirs provide vivid storytelling and expand our experience of human community. Often, these days, they give voice to populations that have been historically marginalized, thus creating a richer and more accurate sense of the complexity of our society.