Review by New York Times Review
WITH OUR CIVIC SPHERE dominated by social media, advertising and political pseudo-news, it's easy to despair that cultural subversion is a thing of the past. But in Alissa Quart's new book, "Republic of Outsiders," we meet the often unlikely agitators who are participating in new social and cultural revolutions using the tools of what we would once have called the Man - technology, entrepreneurialism and even finance. What emerges is a hopeful, if sometimes uneven, portrait of a mainstream culture that's constantly being rewritten by the people at its margins. Quart's gift as a writer is her ability to report on the experiences of ordinary people, following their realistically messy lives for years, offering us vivid portraits that are profoundly humane. That said, the people she chooses to profile here challenge the mainstream in such dramatically incommensurate ways that it can be difficult to detect a pattern linking them all. A few commonalities do emerge, however. All of her outsiders have benefited from the rise of Internet technologies, and they've all found communities where they feel at home. Also, given Quart's own predilections, it's not surprising that a lot of her subjects are writers. The book begins with a fascinating chapter on patient advocates among people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses that many doctors treat with drugs. Instead of allowing medical experts to define them, these people espouse "mad pride" and create communities where peer counseling replaces institutionalization. One subject has become an artist, and another an activist devoted to helping people like himself lead autonomous lives. Quart links the mad priders to the "althealth" movement of the 1970s, when patients insisted on being active participants in their own treatment. The same ethos can be seen today in online communities of the "neurodiverse" - for example, people with autism or Asperger's - who provide support and information about new therapies. Many of us are used to thinking about outsider status in the context of artistic or political subcultures, and that's what makes Quart's reporting on what she calls "outsider mentality" such a brilliant move. She unmasks the assumptions we make about what counts as normal, and marshals our sympathies for people who want to control their own destinies in a world that insists that they can't. Along the way, she makes a persuasive case that medical and scientific institutions must change if we're to move mainstream culture in the right direction. The book falters when Quart chooses to place transgender feminists alongside mad priders and non-neurotypicals in her section on outsider mentality. By trying to compare such dramatically different kinds of outsiders, she loses the ability to explain the dissimilar problems they face. Feminism is a political movement aimed at dismantling gender inequality, and transgendered people are a minority group who often suffer from political discrimination. But Quart takes great pains to avoid politicizing the experiences of anyone she interviews. Instead, she uses business-speak. Of one of her trans subjects she writes, "Rey, like other 'outsiders' I met, was a cultural entrepreneur of a sort, selling an idea of transformation to a broader public as well as consuming it himself." Transgender feminism winds up sounding like a matter of clever marketing, and we never learn about the forms of political discrimination that trans people like Rey face. Quart may shy away from politics, but she's not afraid to tackle economic outsiders. She devotes the final sections of the book to people she calls "identity innovators." These are amateur musicians, filmmakers, chefs and crafters who are appropriating the tools of entrepreneurialism to reinvent themselves - and make some money in the process. We meet the crowdfimding diva Amanda Palmer, who raised over $1 million on Kickstarter so she could make an album independent of the major labels. And we follow the exploits of a vegetarian crusader, founder of the company Field Roast, who fights for animal rights by making millions of dollars selling a meat substitute made from grain. IN THESE STORIES, Quart's argument that the Internet is enabling identity innovation is convincing. People whose weird horror movies would once have been projected on the walls of sideshow tents or shown at rural drive-in theaters can now drum up a flash-mob audience in Los Angeles. And crafters can use Etsy to make money on the art that would once have been a personal hobby. It's hard to see what these quirky capitalists share with people fighting for basic rights. But Quart views all of her subjects as part of the process by which societies naturally form "counterpublics," groups that challenge our understanding of what is normal - whether in the realm of brain functioning or job descriptions. These counterpublics are coalescing all around us, aided by social media, but with deep historical roots in subversive movements of the past. Ultimately, Quart's subjects in this book stand as evidence that mainstream culture has never been monolithic; the demands of a counterpublic are always transforming it. "Republic of Outsiders" moves from the most vulnerable members of marginal communities to the most powerful ones. Each chapter takes us further up the social and economic ladder, beginning with near-homeless schizophrenics, and ending in the well-appointed dining room of a retired Wall Street executive. In that dining room, high above New York City, the Occupy Bank Working Group meets. "They were all middle-aged and as far from the mainstream Occupy stereotypes as could be imagined," Quart writes. "Almost all of these people had 'straight' jobs and had worked at them for many decades. They were bankers and looked the part. ... They were able to use the technical language of financial services insiders while leveraging outsider identities, values, ideas and goals." Quart allows us to listen in as these members of the ruling class try to figure out how they can dismantle the system that gives them privilege - or at the very least, create a new kind of credit card that will benefit the 99 percent. It seems a shame to end with just a postscript devoted to one of Quart's most intriguing and unexpected examples of outsider community. But her point seems to be that the future of the mainstream is going to be even weirder than anything that's come before. The Occupy Bank Working Group is a vision of what could come next, as new counterpublics begin to populate the financial institutions that control our destinies. More often than not, the things we consider normal today would have been deemed insane a century ago. It's difficult to pinpoint the historical moment when the strange becomes the everyday. But in this book, Quart gives us a few glimpses of what those transitional moments might look like, in her intimate portraits of people who live somewhere between the edge and the center of dominant culture. For Quart, mainstream culture is constantly being rewritten by the people at its margins. ANNALEE NEWITZ is the editor of io9.com, and the author of "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 10, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Once past a rather long-winded introduction, Quart settles into a delightful rhythm, profiling fascinating people and sharing their distinct ways of forming connections and cultivating lives outside the mainstream. Quart's subjects are often living thoroughly twenty-first-century lives, relying on the Internet and social media to form groups, reach out to like-minded individuals, and share their stories. But the author strays far from the expected, including the producers of the indie-film triumph Beasts of the Southern Wild and Kickstarter phenom musician Amanda Palmer. Readers will be surprised to see thoughtful inclusions of the neurodiverse (individuals diagnosed within the autism spectrum) and those defying standard classifications of serious mental illness and challenging our understanding of schizophrenia and bipolarity. More conventionally, Quart dives into the crafting world of Etsy and urban farming in New York City and Detroit, showing time and again that thinking and acting outside the box are often the only way many people can succeed professionally and in their communities. Lots of good food for thought and solid inspiration for those who feel stifled by traditional choices.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran journalist Quart (Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child) focuses on individuals who "have created unusual, idiosyncratic identities" to tackle underrepresented issues and accomplish diverse goals. A perceptive, analytical reporter, Quart profiles a wide range of subjects: transgender activists, who "refuse the neat boxes of gender identity"; the "neurodiverse," who try to redefine how people think about autism and normality in general; independent filmmakers and musicians, who eliminate middlemen by making and distributing their work themselves; animal-rights futurists who are attempting to create a "meat" product from animal cells in a process that harms no animals; "mad priders" and "Icarists," who emphasize community and peer service over clinical treatment of the mentally ill; and a former Wall Street trader who is trying to create nonpredatory financial networks for the needy. Quart's profiles are thoroughly researched and admirably evenhanded. She investigates the vast range of subcultures linked and enabled by the Web, showing that the line between insiders and outsiders is rather fluid when we live in a "clever capitalist society that shapes our attempts to resist." Railing against modern institutions, from too-big-to-fail banks to the superficial, profit-driven entertainment industry, she effectively examines how outsider thinking can supplement, and in some cases supplant, mainstream methods. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The ways in which a cross-section of intrepid renegades finds contentment and success by swimming upstream. Journalist Quart (Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, 2006) highlights a host of individuals she views as part of a continuing, modern rebellion movement that's incrementally restructuring the country from the inside out. They are the social outsiders who've created an "America within America." The author deftly examines how these cultural oddities and outcasts bond through their separate differences yet remain determined to find common ground, whether through agricultural breakthroughs, mental deficiencies or the distillation of their creative preferences. The examples she presents are as diverse as the message of superfunctional nonconformity they are intent on disbursing to society at large. Quart describes time spent with a group of "Mad Priders" who dismiss the conventional clinical process for diagnosing and treating the mentally ill; a female-to-male transgendered activist; an autistic woman fighting to redefine how mainstream society views the "neurodiverse" community; substantive, un-Hollywood film collectives broadening the independent genre; and enterprising agricultural and animal rights innovators developing "faux meat." Quart's associations enhance and illuminate the plight of the free-thinker; even within the brevity of a paragraph, the author generously commemorates even more outliers: the right-to-lifers, married gay couples, DIY birthers, gun stockpilers and the "freegans" who dumpster-dive for meals. Quart asserts that while "their trust in authority faltered and they fell back on their own intelligence to survive," the spectrum of these individuals' reach in society is just beginning to manifest itself. A thought-provoking examination of counterculture through the eyes of those living life just outside the conventional box.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
