Carol’s Reviews > Dead and Alive > Status Update
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Carol
is on page 303 of 331
But I wonder if we don’t assume too much when we imagine we can ever know in advance what kind of a sentence will reach a suffering person in their suffering. How can we be sure which sentences will give a suffering person strength for the fight? Nelson Mandela read Soul on Ice in that cell on Robben Island. He also read the Collected Works of William Shakespeare.
— Feb 25, 2026 12:17PM
Carol
is on page 282 of 331
And the more precisely you describe and understand the past the less likely you are to misread and vulgarize and misapprehend the present. The narcissism of the present is that it wants the past to conform to its present demands. You can’t learn the lessons of the past if you rewrite them in the retelling.
— Feb 25, 2026 10:37AM
Carol
is on page 279 of 331
People reveal more about themselves in one week on Instagram than I’ve done on the page in twenty years.
— Feb 25, 2026 10:32AM
Carol
is on page 238 of 331
[A] large part of the wonder of Hilary [Mantel] was that she…never let go of any part of herself. They were all still alive and pulsating inside her: the angry child who hated childhood but loved the beaches of Budleigh, the young woman eager for escape, the potential mother, the medium, the healthy person, the ex-wife, the unknown novelist, the lawyer, historian, journalist. She was populated by many ghosts.
— Feb 24, 2026 08:39PM
Carol
is on page 181 of 331
Inequality has also proved ruinous for culture, universities, the cities, the country, farmers, teachers, doctors, the police, the working classes, the lower middle classes and, at this point, even a fair whack of the rich middle class, who find themselves … sounding deranged as they complain about being potentially priced out of a private school that more than 90% of people will never attend.
— Feb 24, 2026 11:54AM
Carol
is on page 165 of 331
I hope it continues to be [Kara Walker’s] self-defined job to gather all the ruins of her own, and our, history — everything abject and beautiful, holy and unholy— into one place, without perfect alignment, without needing to be seen to be good, so that she might make art from it. And thus stand up for the subconscious, for the unsaid and unsayable, for the historically and personally indigestible…
— Feb 24, 2026 09:23AM
Carol
is on page 149 of 331
It is no exaggeration to say that the only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that ‘we’ ended it. Even more extraordinary to me now is how many second-generation Caribbean kids in the UK grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the bizarre notion that our families were somehow native to ‘the islands’, had always been there, even as we pored over the history of ‘American slavery.’
— Feb 24, 2026 08:58AM
Carol
is on page 138 of 331
To read Black England is to discover that many imperfect and blinkered people, black and white, enslaved and free, with all kinds of dubious or complex motivations, struggled for hundreds of years to end a global system of capital so large that no element of English life was not in some mode driven by it. They did it. Heaven and earth did not immediately follow — but one version of hell did end.
— Feb 24, 2026 08:41AM
Carol
is on page 135 of 331
As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact — in that popular courtroom called ‘The Right Side of History’ — when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. The judgment goes both ways.
— Feb 24, 2026 08:35AM
