Description: "Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, apart from the focused operations of media, government, and aviation-industry crash investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural material-poems and novels, songs, films, art, tv series, and on and on-that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture-more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways"--
Brief description: Randy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of 12 books, including the influential Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (NYU Press, 1998), The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist (Intellect, 2018), and Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers (Reaktion, 2021). He writes about film, travel, ecocriticism, and culture for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Film International, Common Knowledge, Salon, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and truthout. He has been interviewed about his books on NPR, BBC, CNN, and numerous podcasts. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Review Quotes:
"A tour de force of existential philosophy, media studies, art history, mobility studies, literary criticism, and more. [...] A broad range of humanists will find value in Malamud's book, not just as a novel exploration of the cultural debris fields of airplane crashes but also as an invitation to make something out of other such uncharted aspects of modern human existence. That, CRASH! proves, is one of the duties of the humanist." --Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
"Malamud convincingly illustrates how technology and culture intersect during air disasters. His interdisciplinary approach, combining scholarly rigor, witty asides, and compelling examples, makes the book both accessible and insightful." --Technology & Culture "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) "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) "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 ... 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