This book is a searing chronicle of gun violence in the United States. Auster starts with his own connection to gun violence: his grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was little. In showing the consequences of this action to just one family, it amplifies the horror of the mass shootings laid out in this book. The silent, still photographs of the places where mass shootings have taken place are haunting in their ordinariness. These were just everyday places until they weren't anymore. This book does an admirable job of highlighting the human cost of our national narrative about guns, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs to be reminded of this cost so that maybe we can work to change this narrative to one of non-violence.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for this free arc.
Paul gives a very strong case for gun safety laws and uses his own family story as an example.

'Bloodbath Nation', written by Paul Auster, and featuring photography by Spencer Ostrander, is a thought provoking and horrifying, but necessary read.

It chronicles the unending epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings in the United States, and the history of guns and gun control in America.
Auster takes a look at the state of America's perverse relationship with guns and its acceptance of mass shootings as part of living in a "free society".
He talks about how we have become almost desensitized to hearing news of mass shootings because of how frequent they are now.
On an average, more than 100 Americans are killed and over 200 others injured every day, in gun related incidents. There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, which is more than all men, women and children combined.

The novelist talks about his personal experiences and encounters with guns throughout his life, including the chilling murder his family hid for five decades, and the never-ending trauma that came with it.

In 'Bloodbath Nation', Auster explains the history behind the "right to bear arms", and he covers the American Frontier Wars and colonial violence against the various American Indian and First Nation tribes.
He takes a look at the more recent history of mass shootings: Sandy Hook Elementary School, Uvalde, The First Baptist Church in Sutherland, The Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Parkland, Mandalay Bay and El Paso - and how the US has done almost nothing to stop them.

'Bloodbath Nation' is a grim reminder that no lessons have been learned from the past, no concrete measures have been enforced, and there doesn't seem to be a strong desire for change.

Huge thanks to @netgalley and @grovepress for the free advanced reader copy of 'Bloodbath Nation' in exchange for my honest review.

Paul Auster writes a searing book about gun violence.His writing is so vivid the horror of this epidemic wrenches at your heart is truly sickening.The photographs makes his essay even more vivid. Highly recommend for discussion book clubs.# netgalley #bloodbathnation.

I love Paul Auster and this was the first non fiction I read. It's powerful, thought provoking and passionate.
A book to make people reflect on violence and guns.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Like so many, I'm a long-time fan of Paul Auster's writing. This is a departure from his usual fiction: a short, powerful book about why the US is so obsessed with guns of all sorts and what can be done about it. The information may not be new to all readers such as our history of a frontier nation that obliterated huge numbers of indigenous people, but it is powerful in its compactness, outstanding writing, and photographs documenting scenes of particularly tragic examples resulting from of our love of firearms. Auster looks at the mentality of individuals who have committed violence and asks the question most of us ask: what led this person to do this and can anything be done to prevent these events from recurring? Auster is not naive about the difficulty of changing such a deeply rooted value held by many of our citizens, but he tackles the issue head-on with succinct power.

Paul Auster has written some of the finest books I’ve read, he’s nimble of mind and without doubt a master wordsmith. Aside from many (perhaps all) of his novels, I’ve also read some of his non-fiction, these being almost entirely introspective and largely biographical. But this one is different, here he turns his attention to guns and wonders why has America allowed itself to become a place where the number of guns owned exceeds the number of its citizens? But more importantly, what is it do do about the fact that the country accounts for around three quarters of the world’s mass shootings.

He takes us through the history of guns in his country, explaining how and why this point has been reached. He provides a pretty exhaustive breakdown of legislation and the political backdrop impacting this growth and also talks about power that the NRA has garnered, which pretty much ensures that the impasse between the anti-gun and pro-gun proclaimers will not be resolved any time soon. Accompanying the text are a good number of unpopulated photographs showing sites where mass shootings have occurred: a car park, a nightclub, a school and other such everyday places. The impact off these photos, I found, was to draw my attention to the fact that these terrible events can happen anywhere. In fact, just a few short weeks after I’d visited Las Vegas on holiday the worst mass shooting ever recorded in America unfolded in this city, just a short distance from where I was staying.

Auster doesn’t offer any solutions, just a few suggestions as to minor first steps that could be taken, but he does make his own views clear with a clarity you’d expect from a man with his gifts. The tone here is one of horror but also of resignation. It’s a short, sobering and ultimately scary summary which purveyed a prognosis that I could only read as ‘hopeless, more of the same to come’. As a footnote, on the morning I finished this book I opened up the BBC news page on my phone to be greeted with a headline announcing that a six-year-old child had shot his teacher with a handgun, in America.

You can feel Auster's passion in these pages. The photographs create another world all their own. Nothing new is being said here. But what else can be said? It feels like speaking out against gun violence and suggesting, hoping for, demanding a change in policy is all that any intelligent person can do.

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC. I saw the author and bit. This is not one of Auster's wonderful fictions though, this is real life.

In Bloodbath Nation Paul Auster gives us a searing description of the state of the USA and its increasingly baffling reliance on guns. His opinions are well reasoned and based on historical evidence. He's certainly right that attempting to rid the US of all firearms would not work, we only have to look at prohibition or banned books to know that when something is denied it is sought all the more.

However arguments aside the figures are staggering. So many deaths, so many lives ended, ruined, interrupted, wasted. It makes for a sobering read.

It is only made more unnerving by Spencer Ostrander's photographs of the sites of some of the more publicised massacres (or mass shootings if you prefer). There are no bodies but the captions tell their own story - most of these sites are now bulldozed or remain closed since the shooting.

Auster also looks at the perpetrators, explains the history behind the "right to bear arms" and the more recent history that led to the state the US is in now - fractured and hurting.

The question why America and nowhere else is a good one. The answer may be a long time coming as the two sides of pro and anti gun cannot agree on the simplest of conundrums, ie who/what do we blame? The guns or the people who wield them.

I do not know the answer but surely a dialogue should be started between the two sides or (with the installation of another divisive president - whoever they may be) the US's problems will only get worse.

Read it. It may only be an essay but it is concise, well considered and erudite.

I’ll make this very simple. American Treasure Paul Auster’s chilling new book, #Bloodbath Nation is one of the most sobering essays you’ll ever read. Chronicling the epidemic of mass violence that is running rampant in our country',#Bloodbath Nation should be required reading for America of the 21st Century. Read it and weep.

"Bloodbath Nation" tackles, with passion and Paul Auster's impeccable flowing prose, why the United States has seen more than a million and half killings by guns. Photographer Spencer Ostrander travels to gun massacre sites after such events, and composes haunting stills with no humans in them, and these photographs, interspersed regularly through the text, cast an eerie glow over Auster's words. Auster recounts his own encounters with guns, including the never-ending trauma of his grandmother having shot his grandfather to death. To a non-American, the situation is scarcely credible but the book hammers home the manifest tragedies by spending quite some time on the most horrendous mass shootings. Bloodbath Nation is concise and Auster seems to hold no hope for resolving the societal deadlock on the issue of gun control, but this is a most useful and moving forensic examination of the issue.

Paul Auster’s essay is an original attempt from a very great author to analyse and understand the problem of gun violence in the USA. Gun violence is a real problem of the America society, in fact 82% of all gun deaths take place in the US. Each year 40.000 Americans are killed by gunshot wounds and 80.000 are wounded by guns. But we should not only consider the victims, but also those Americans directly or indirectly marked by gun violence. To confirm the urgency of the problem, we also find photographs taken by Spencer Ostrander about thirty sites of mass shootings occurred in recent years, sites that are properly called by Auster as “gravestones of our collective grief”.

Auster claims that gun violence is a serious question, but there is no concerted effort to tackle that problem from states or institutions, because guns are one of the two pillars of the American mythology. Guns represent for the Americans an idea of freedom and individual empowerment. And there is also the powerful lobby of guns, the NRA, that is doing whatever they can to impede that every legislation that is aimed to curb the selling of guns is taken seriously. The NRA strongly states that Americans have the right to arm themselves against the murderous intentions of others.

Legislations and laws imposing restrictions on the brandishing of guns have always been part of the American life, but they failed to address properly the problem. Auster’s states that a society, like the American one, founded on the principles of capitalism, which is a system that is based on competition and conflict and that opposes those who accumulate wealth and property to those who lose and live in poverty, and that exalts selfishness instead of cooperation, it is quite impossible to address a calamity like the excess of gun violence. What can be done is simply imposing restrictions on the selling of guns, especially adopting gun-purchase bans on people who have committed violent crimes or that have manifested mental or emotional disturbances. That can at least mitigate the damage caused by guns, but that is not sufficient and even the data states that things are worsening. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, gun violence has risen sharply and the black-market trafficking illegal guns is still proliferating.

*3.5/5
Overall, I really enjoyed Auster’s writing style and found Bloodbath Nation a quick and engaging read. Unless you’re new to reading about guns/gun culture, the majority of the book will be more of a review than learning anything new. Thank you to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Was expecting to gain new insights/perspectives on the gun crisis in America. If you're someone who has been somewhat in tune with the state of the country over the last decade, most of this book will not come as a surprise. I would say I only found maybe 20% of the content new or insightful, and that includes the author's personal family connection to gun violence. I would only recommend this to people who have been asleep over the last decade.

I love Paul Aster. His ability to write fiction is incredible and this book about guns and gun culture and this experience with this culture and yet so removed from the gun culture of today was so illuminating.

TL;DR version: A succinct and outstandingly written hybrid of memoir, American social and political history, and philosophical inquiry. The high-quality writing you expect from a veteran like Paul Auster, even in subject matter he does not directly tackle in his fiction and other memoirs. Yet it's unlikely to change any minds.

BLOODBATH NATION does everything it should: summarizing in clear and propulsive prose how the U.S. became the preeminent land of gun violence and mass shootings. He covers all the right bases, starting with colonists' frontier wars against the country's Native population and getting as far as the Pulse, Parkland, Mandalay Bay and El Paso mass shootings. He weaves in his (admittedly brief) romance with the idea of guns as a child/adolescent to explain how the appeal of gun ownership and the act of shooting is so tempting. He closes out the book admitting his inability to predict or even plausibly imagine how the problem can be solved. (He alludes to this lack of knowledge in various moments before the end as well; this is perhaps the most deeply felt material in the book.)

Here's the problem: I don't know what tangible benefit this book has other than the obvious fact of being a good book with powerful and relevant subject matter. Perhaps that has to be enough - but it doesn't seem like that's Auster's full intent. Books and essays like BLOODBATH NATION are published with some regularity, some of them stridently anti-gun and others more nuanced like this one. Mostly they are read and praised by people who already are just as appalled as Auster is at the state of America's perverse relationship to guns and direct or tacit acceptance of regular mass shootings. It's preaching to the converted. It reminds me of Garry Wills's passionate 2012 essay on this subject, "Our Moloch," which in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings Wills literally compared American gun violence to child sacrifices to the most infamous demon-god of the Bible's Old Testament. But he published it in the New York Review of Books, an outlet that even most of liberal or leftist America doesn't regularly read.

Auster's book will draw more attention than that, at least, for various reasons. For one, Auster is known to a group of readers that likely includes a fair number of people in the quote unquote center and maybe even a few semi-conservatives, perhaps even the ones whose conservatism isn't one-issue 2A worship. He also includes the story of the Sutherland Springs, Texas man who was a responsible gun owner (a target-shooting hobbyist who locked up his guns carefully). This man prevented the shooter at that town's Baptist Church from killing and wounding many more than the 25 and 22 who were killed and wounded by shooting him several times and chasing him away from the church. (The shooter and pursuer concluded their chase in vehicles, and the former ultimately blew his brains out after realizing he couldn't escape capture or justifiable homicide.) Auster paints a nuanced picture of this man's common-sense gun use, unglamorous heroism and the mental agony he went through after nearly killing a truly vicious man ... and also adds that the man did not decline various future invitations to speak at NRA conventions.

The inclusion of this story and its shades of gray ensures it cannot be dismissed as a black-and-white polemic by anyone who actually reads it. But will the handful of people whose minds could be changed by this nuanced argument actually see it? I hope so, but have serious doubts.

The last matter worth discussing about BLOODBATH NATION is its haunting use of Spencer Ostrander's photography. (Even in digital ARC form they stand out and likely will do so better in the print editions.) Ostrander photographed the sites of mass shootings long after the bodies, bullets and blood had been cleared away, making them austere, desolate and empty monuments to horror. It remains to be seen whether this tactic has more or less impact than, say, presenting graphic photos of the violence. (This obviously would have caused considerable legal complications and would of course be very ethically dubious, but might it have made a more obvious point? I truly do not know.)

I am a long time fan of the writing of Paul Auster, and his take on gun violence and the history of guns and gun control in America was exactly as moving as I expected it to be. With a powerful clarity that blends a desire for change with a strong sense of the unfortunate reality surrounding the emotional issue of guns in the United States, Auster presents a moving, horrifying, and enlightning series of facts blended with powerful imagery from the sites of recent mass shootings. This was a fantastic thought piece.

Paul Auster is one of the rare authors who can expound on just about any subject and make his thoughts worth reading, even if he's not contributing any original ideas to the conversation. "Bloodbath Nation" is really more of a personal essay than a book - I would be surprised if it clocked in at any higher than fourty thousand words, and a not-insignificant amount of page space is taken by photos that don't add much to the overall effect. And Auster is not really offering any analysis of or suggestions about gun violence that have not been raised many times before. But he's eloquent enough that his reflections are still worth reading, even if all you get from them is a moment of quiet contemplation. I'm glad I read it.

Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster

9780802160454

160 Pages
Publisher: Grove Atlantic, Grove Press
Release Date: January 10, 2023

Nonfiction (Adult), Politics, Gun Control, Mass Killings

The author begins the book by telling stories of his experience with guns. As a toddler and young boy, he played being a cowboy with hat, holster, and gun. The only thing missing was a horse. When he was older, he went to summer camp and attended a gun shooting course. Later, he went to a friend’s home and did skeet shooting. He describes his relationship with guns in relation to other boys and young men that grew up constantly around guns and hunting. He also tells a few stories from his time with the merchant marines.

The bulk of the book revolves around mass shootings around the country. He talks about how we have been almost desensitized to hearing news of shootings because they are now so frequent. There is one story where he goes into more detail. It is the good guy with a gun versus the bad guy with a gun.

The story is well written and researched. There are eerie photos of shooting sites without any people. It is sad to realize that gun control is something that must be fought over. As a gun owner, it makes sense to me that the number of mass shootings would go down if there was gun control.

Paul Auster’s “Bloodbath Nation” is a cathartic jeremiad on an insidious phenomenon that has gripped the world’s biggest economy. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, Auster informs us, released some statistical detail which makes for some sobering reading. Annually, close to 40,000 Americans succumb to gunshot wounds, while 80,000 more are left nursing scars, both physical and mental. Thus, on an average, more than 100 Americans are killed and over 200 others injured every day, courtesy a gunman going rogue, or a cop gone crazy or a depressed individual bidding life goodbye. With more than 393 million guns currently possessed by the US populace, there are more firearms in the country than all men, women and children combined.

Auster once said, “memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.” In the America of today a part of the space reserved for memory seems to be racked by a tragedy possessing the unfortunate propensity to repeat itself on loop. From Sandy Hook Elementary School to Uvalde; from The First Baptist Church in Sutherland to The Pulse Night Club, Orlando, no lessons are learned, no concrete measures are instituted, and no promise is kept. Candlelight vigils and desk thumping debates are very poor substitutes (if at all) for gun control bills and prophylactic restraints.

Auster hits the nail on its head when he claims that the menace of gun control will forever remain perched above our heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles unless there is a collective and urgent acknowledgement that it represents a grave public health threat. Charting the evolutionary trajectory between cars and guns, two phenomena which symbolize both the trappings of prosperity and the travesty of justice respectively, in America, Auster argues that while there have been constant and incremental enhancements to the safety of passenger transport such as introduction of seat belts, airbags etc, there have been no commensurate benevolent outcomes in so far as the reckless wielding of a gun is concerned.

This dichotomy, according to Auster, can be traced to what he derisively terms “the sublime hypocrisy” characterizing the formation of America as an independent nation. While a marauding militia went about massacring and displacing the native Indians, before seizing their land and laying down colonial roots, the Declaration of Independence, legislated the second Amendment which provided the right to possess and employ firearms. The 2008 Supreme Court decision in the District of Columbia v Heller case, bestowed ultimate universality and legitimacy to gun ownership by interpreting that the rights to own a weapon, as postulated by the Second Amendment was not just restricted to the military or the law enforcement agencies but to every other individual who called America, home. Some weak restrictions that forbade the use and firing of a firearm within the confines of educational, medical and religious institutions stayed obfuscated by the ramifications of the original and more primary verdict.

Auster recollects the tragic consequences marring his own family as a result of a misused weapon in a nondescript yet powerful manner. A family secret of over half a century is prised open, following a chance encounter by one of Auster’s cousins with a passenger who happens to know Paul Auster’s father and uncles. However Auster’s first eye opening understanding of the damage that could be wreaked by both a weapon and the indiscreet man holding it, takes place when he is on board an Esso oil tanker as a seaman during a six month stint in the merchant marine. Being one of the youngest and the least experienced men on board he soon strikes up a friendship with Lamar, ‘a short, stringy-haired redhead from Baton Rouge with a white, crimson splotch marring the white of his left eye…” Lamar is also an equally inexperienced and soft spoken seaman looking for company. Auster’s conviction in Lamar’s sincerity and outlook is shaken to the bones, when the latter nonchalantly reveals one day that a hobby of his happens to be parking himself on an overpass of the interstate highway, and firing live rounds at cars passing by underneath. Upon questioned by Auster on what would have been the consequence if either a bullet had made contact with a car or a scared driver veering off course, Lamar shrugs and laconically replies, ‘Who knows?”

Auster’s lament is supplemented by brooding images in the form of photographs, courtesy Spencer Ostrander. These pictures are of the sites of mass shootings in upwards of thirty, and spaced over the last few years. Not a single animate being inhabits the pictures. Bleak, isolated, and run down, the structures in sepia colour resemble tired and mute spectators within whose precincts some of the most wanton and incomprehensible mayhem were wreaked by a few deranged individuals.

“Bloodbath Nation” is a grim reminder of an existential crisis staring a nation in the face and a fervent plea to recognise and remedy such crisis instead of adopting an ostrich like approach that consists of burying one’s head in the sand while exposing the rest of the body to every possible danger.

(Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster, is published by Grove Atlantic and will be available for sale from the 10th of January 2023 onwards.)

Thank you, Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy.

#BloodbathNation #NetGalley.