Member Reviews
Simone B, Reviewer
I really like this series, and I was interested to read this dispatch on cigarette lighters, but it just never really came together for me.
Lighters are Jerry Bruckheimer. Matches are David Lynch. A lighter is a threat. A match is a promise. A match has a death wish. A lighter wants to live and fight another day.
Sentences like the above make me want to scribble in the margins, expand! Push harder! Instead, Pendarvis goes into a rant about Reservoir Dogs and how he didn't feel like re-watching it.
And so ultimately, this fails to do what the other books in the series (at least the ones that I've read) do so well, take a small thing and turn it and turn it until it becomes about something much bigger, Golf Ball does this with the thing about the moon, Hood does this by linking European history to contemporary histories of power and powerlessness, and Driver's License does both a media history representation and a section on state power and 9/11. This seemed to never get out of the media representation mode where he makes a list of places cigarette lighters appear. I wish the chapter on World War One and Zippo was expanded (for much of the book I wanted to say, slow down! Focus! Push harder!).
Ultimately, there's a telling line toward the end, "Materials is so skimpy that I regretted mentioning car cigarette lighters in earlier chapters and not saving them for this space.". Yep, sadly there's the sense here that there's not enjoy material driving this. Which, fair. Part of the reason I love these books is that I want to watch the tightrope walk the authors do taking something small and making it big. But I guess the tightrope isn't exciting unless everyone once and a while you watch somebody fall.
Many thanks to Bloomsbury Academic and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Cigarette Lighter (and which I was much delayed in reading and reviewing), all opinions are mine.
