The Devil Never Sleeps
and Other Essays
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world--not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania--is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ("a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single woosh") in one of his commentaries on National Public, NPR received forty thousand letters in a protest spearheaded by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Codrescu was warned to "stay away from eschatology."
Thankfully for us, he hasn't. In The Devil Never Sleeps, one of America's shrewdest social critics sets out to uncover the Devil's most modern and insidiously banal incarnations. Once easily recognizable by his horns, tail, and propensity for plague, today's Devil has become embedded in every fiber of our culture. Discussing everything from rock 'n' roll to William Burroughs to New Orleans bars to the Demon of Prosperity, Codrescu mockingly unmasks Old Nick as the opportunistic technocrat he really is. Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today--banality.
In a world teeming with distractions, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil (perhaps they are one and the same), we've become as twenty-four-hour society, swinging desperately between tedium and terror and sleeping fitfully, if at all. As Codrescu points out, the Devil never sleeps because we just won't let him.
With his characteristic charm and playful exuberance, Andrei Codrescu has successfully teased the Devil out from the darkest recesses and comic excesses of the human experience. The Devil Never Sleeps is his most wonderfully perverse book yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prolific poet, memoirist, novelist and National Public Radio commentator Codrescu (Hail Babylon!, The Blood Countess etc.) offers a rousing new collection of essays, full of surprises, treats and provocations. In the title essay, he argues that the devil of medieval Christianity has never ceased acting in the Western psyche's subconscious and that eruptions of the Puritan ethos periodically roil American political and cultural life (examples: Kenneth Starr's "sexual witch hunt," the prohibition against smoking in public places). Several essays and NPR commentaries extend this conceit, as Codrescu criticizes those who demonize others--a category in which he lumps born-again Christian fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, racists, xenophobes and bigots of every stripe. A shrewd observer of American society, Codrescu explores the media's control over mass consciousness, tweaks the stock market's irrationality, examines cyberspace's growing encroachment on everyday reality and laments "the ideology of capitalism-uber-alles" that dominates political discourse. This potpourri includes a tour of Chicago, highlighting its labor and radical past, a tribute to Allen Ginsberg and marvelous pieces refracting the history of New Orleans (where Codrescu lives) through the prism of its cafes, bars and cemeteries. He also recounts his four eventful return trips to Romania, which he left in 1965 at age 19. Some of the best pieces include personal, down-to-earth reflections, for example, on the death of a close friend, or nostalgic ruminations. Codrescu is a freethinking spirit, a breath of fresh air, and this playful, quirky collection reflects his hunger for the world. Color photos not seen by PW.
