Bulletproof Vest

Object Lessons

by Kenneth R. Rosen, Christopher Schaberg (Editor), Ian Bogost (Editor)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

"Nothing's bulletproof," the salesman said. "The thing's only bullet resistant." The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and mundane applications are often lost, as it is now synonymous with body armor, war zones, and domestic terrorism.

What Rosen learned through intimate use of his vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security. Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulletproof vest on a molecular level and on the world stage. It's also an ode to living precariously, an open letter that defends the notion that life is worth the risk.


A portion of the author's proceeds will be donated to RISC, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical training to freelance conflict journalists. For more information, go to www.risctraining.org.


Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Genres: Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 16, 2020

About the author

Kenneth R. Rosen has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, VQR, and the Atlantic. He spent seven years at the New York Times, his hometown newspaper, and now divides his time between northern Italy and Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Peter Baran · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another Object Lesson book, and one that I felt would be more specific that Political Sign (which I enjoyed but was a hugely broad project for a monogram). Here I could see a lot of potential in talking about the development of body armour, of what bulletproof an stab-proof vests symbolise in culture. The concept of being bulletproof, and how that plays with being the opposite of a weaponry and the kind of privilege it might bestow on people wearing them. The overestimation of the power of vests in films, how they play in the military industrial complex view of conflict resolution.

It is bad form to criticise a book for what it is not, but on the whole it is none of those things. Rosen is a foreign correspondent, and some time war journalist, and to some degree I appreciated this very personal take on what his own PPE has meant to him (and its eventual uselessness). I liked the conclusions made that bullet-proof vests are no match for decent relationships made with people in the know, with fixers, translators and in country knowledge. But this is a monograph which is overly personal. I think I know why it starts with the authors failed young suicide attempt by handgun (there are some delicious ironies), but if 80% of the rest of the book is also going to be war correspondent memoirs it stops being about bulletproof vests, and actually about Rosen. There are not that many fascinating bits of trivia or history here, beyond an chapter of the fascinating woman who invented Kevlar, There is a technical, near listical bit on the development of full armour, and its rise and fall, but no statistics on the efficacy of actual bulletproof vests. And again like Political Sign, this is a relentlessly US centric narrative - there is no consideration on how armour or bulletproof vests are used by the other side, barely the obvious comparison between the bulletproof vest and the bomb filled vest.

I think these monographs are great ideas, and are full of potential, but the two I have read have suffered from commissioning people who already knock out long reads for newspapers to write them. I liked Political Sign, I just wanted a broader perspective. Bulletproof Vest was a compelling narrative and it does go a long way towards making its key point (BPV's are basically symbols rather than useful), but it is of a tradition of reflecting the subject through a very personal lense and even then I thought the subject was probably just Rosen and his own neuroses.

(Read as a Netgalley Arc)

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

We have a female materials chemist to thank for Kevlar, don't you know, although the thing was only developed because DuPont were trying to make car tyres less weighty in an impending oil crisis. Nowadays the list of things it's used to make is quite eye-boggling. But of course its headline use is in personal protection, in bullet-resistant body armour. Our author, having spent several years in Iraq and elsewhere in the Levant as a war correspondent on the tails of ISIS, knows full well the weight, feel and benefit of such security. This book, more memoir than you'd perhaps expect (it even begins with him attempting suicide), is about the use of the material, and a personal look at what use he got out of it. Because the easiest thing to defeat such bulletproof (sic) material is a human being, and at the same time the greatest protection one might need, is a friend.

Every book in this series seems to want to come at its subject in wilfully personal ways, and many times that's to the detriment of the reader learning and/or enjoying anything. I can't say I learnt what I expected to learn from this, as I had no such prejudging under my belt. I can't say I enjoyed it a heck of a lot. But the fact the essay boils down to the psychology of the vests concerned was a surprise, and a not unpleasant one. It's told with authority, based of course on such personal experience, and conveys a surprisingly moody feel for what is supposed to be a non-fictional guide to something material some people just have lying around. It might make you question your own use of metaphorical (or real) comfort blankets like Linus. Our author ends the book using a different set of comforters, but a bulletproof vest isn't one of them.

Three and a half stars.

[Brian Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Object Lessons presents a deeper look at everyday objects. For some a buletproof vest is not an everyday object but for those working in securty, law enforcement, the military etc, it certainly is.

Kenneth Rosen is a war correspondent and he becomes familiar with his bulletproof vest.

What makes this book hugely interesting is that, in its opening pages, Rosen completely bares his soul and narrates a botched suicide attempt with a pistol. We then jump forward to him preparing for his first assignment in a war zone and his purchases. Of course the body armour factors big in this section.

Once Rosen reaches the war zone he finds that his initial conceit that he would endlessly wear the body armour quickly fades away and he hardly ever uses it. In his first assignment he touches the body armour more than wears it, he treats it like a comfort blanket.

Rosen weaves his experiences and anxieties of working in war zones in a very deft and readable fashion, he really is an excellent writer. The body armour sometimes looms large in his narrative, at other times it fades into the background.

At first I thought this was strange as the book is about a single object. However, this style makes sense as the book is about the particular set of body armour that Rosen purchased and its proximity to his life waxes and wanes. In the final analysis, is this not the nature of all physical objects?

This book is short, readable and very thought-provoking, I look forward to reading other books in this series.

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bulletproof Vest (Object Lessons) by Kenneth R Rosen is another volume in Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series. Like the others I have read, this combines the personal with the broader understanding of the object under discussion.

As a war correspondent, Rosen had need of an actual physical bulletproof (or bullet resistant as he was informed) vest. It is in going into the history of personal protective equipment and especially Kevlar that we are also shown the limitations of such protection. When this factual aspect of product history meets up with his personal history of feeling safe, protected, and/or secure, we begin to reflect on what actually constitutes feeling protected as compared to actually being protected. While Rosen makes these contrasts explicit in the extreme circumstances of a war zone he also reflects on the more internal and personal types of insecurity and feeling unsafe.

I found these ideas, and the thoughts they generated in my mind, most interesting. When are we technically the most safe from any particular danger and does that always coincide with when we actually feel the safest? In my case, often not. As he mentions, it is often the company of others, the feeling of community, however temporary or fragile it might be, that provides the feeling of safety, even in the absence of whatever technology we might have that is designed to protect us.

I thought back to my time on subs. For the first period of time I felt neither safe nor unsafe, though as a submariner you know how close you always are to catastrophe. Yet when I went through the training to become a boat's diver I actually felt safer, even though on the whole my safety level hadn't changed and, in case of some types of accidents, my safety was what was jeopardized first. Yet the feeling of choice and having some small amount of control made me feel safer. I think Rosen's work will make many readers reflect on times or situations where what made them feel safe wasn't necessarily safer for them and was potentially less safe. But we could feel, even momentarily, "bulletproof." [Just for clarity, I was in the Navy in the 1970s and early 80s, there was no rating, as there is now, for Navy Diver (ND). Every sub had a couple of crew members who went through a grueling SEAL led course to become certified. So I was not a full-fledged Navy Diver like there is now. I was trained primarily so that if we needed to leave a disabled boat underwater through the escape hatch I could help lead such an operation.]

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[The Idle Woman · Rating 3 out of 5]

After Coffee, I decided to try another of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons books, to see whether I’d misunderstood the gist of the series. Fortunately, Bulletproof Vest was a better fit for my expectations: a moving personal story woven around the object’s history. It’s a tale, first and foremost, of the human desire to both destroy and protect. Rosen experiences the former in a cataclysm of depression when, with his self-worth shredded and with years of self-loathing behind him, he comes within a hair’s breadth of suicide. Ironically, for what follows, his weapon of choice is a gun. Later, having clawed his way out of the depths, he channels his self-destructive instincts in a new direction, thanks to his work as a journalist. ‘Pointing the lens outward,’ he writes, ‘would allow me to heal my inner disruption‘. And so he signs up for work as a war correspondent in Iraq, a job which will bring him face to face with the innate human desire to conquer and kill, but which will also require him to take concrete, proactive steps to protect himself. Rosen buys his first bulletproof vest, and thus the story begins...

https://theidlewoman.net/2020/04/28/b...

[Heather]

I'll reserve judgement on this piece having read it while on deployment in a combat zone (isn't it ironic, doncha think?). Everyone deserves to tell their story.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloomsbury Academic Object Lessions is a fabulous series. It is like a mystery prize, you never know what you are going to get. Previous stories I have read ranged from offbeat quirky to forgettable.

Bulletproof Vest has now set the bar very high. Rosen carefully unpicks the stitches holding the armour together to dispel its illusion of safety and recast it as a security blanket. It was fascinating. It look me completely out of my regular reading zone and I was absolutely riveted.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Academic for the reading copy.

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Bulletproof Vest, Rosen explores the significance of this war zone accessory with compelling nuance and knowledge of military history. Perhaps more impressive, though, is his willingness to explore the relationship between military protective gear and human vulnerability. We can learn about the inventor Stephanie Kwolek, who discovered Kevlar, but we can also learn about how fragility — and the illusion of safety — relates to being human.

[Fussnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you like strong writing? this is a great book, very short. You are taken into war reporting in the pocket of a reporter. So strongly written it's hard to say much.