Bloodbath Nation

De: Paul Auster

Narrado por: Kaleo Griffith

An intimate and astonishing rumination on gun violence in America from one of our greatest living writers and “genuine American original” (The Boston Globe) Paul Auster.

Paul Auster was a crack marksman as a kid, and like most American boys of his generation he grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B-Westerns. But he also knows how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence: His grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was just six years old.

Now, at this time of intense national discord, no issue divides Americans more deeply than the debate about guns. There are currently more guns than people in the United States, and every day more than 100 Americans are killed by guns and another 200 are wounded. These numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different—and why are we the most violent country in the Western world?

In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero.

Bloodbath Nation is an unflinching work about guns in America that asks: What kind of society do we want to live in?

2023 Spencer Ostrander (Collaborator)

©2023 Paul Auster. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Thank you Paul Auster

It is very moving to hear how gun violence impacted Paul Auster's family. I learned more about the wild west in America, and how our society is more dangerous and violent today, in the country where guns outnumber people.

No Clear Argument

I do not doubt the sincerity of Auster’s writing. No question.

I cannot, however, figure out his argument. He does clearly say that the all-out ban on all guns would never work, but does he offer an alternative? Yes and no. The judgments of the nation’s Courts, he suggests, are not likely to benefit anti-gun crowd. Gun control laws? That could work, but the NRA and gun lobby money are in the way. So how does America solve its gun problem? Auster doesn’t really say.