I do much of my reading these days on New York City’s A train, en route from my Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy to Harlem, and that’s where I read much of Jeff Sharlet’s latest, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between. As it turns out, that’s just the place to read it. The train car is one of those only-in-America places, a microcosm of the country’s manifold social and cultural contradictions. After we’ve all packed in and stood clear of the closing doors, our gazes wander around, each straphanger at once observer and observed, the subject and object of fears, desires, and annoyances. Itinerant preachers seek—and, surprisingly often, find—a sympathetic audience. It could all be taken straight off a page of Sharlet’s book.

To focus on my reading amidst all this, I often drown out the sounds around me with my clunky Koss headphones, thereby acting out the aloofness that Georg Simmel recognized as the outward expression of the big city’s typical subjective orientation: the famous “blasé attitude.” This attitude is at a great distance from Sharlet’s, who embodies true engagement in all his encounters documented in the book. Still, it turns out that playing music is also an apt thing to do while reading Sweet Heaven. Music plays a big role in Sharlet’s dispatches—Neil Young, Creedence, the Philadelphia-based hardcore band The Boils, an anarchist marching band, Dock Boggs, and, of course, sometime spoken-word artist Cornel West all make appearances—and as I was reading the book’s would-be titular opening chapter, “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado,” while blasting the Queens-based rap group Das Racist, I couldn’t help noting the parallels between their verse and Sharlet’s prose. There’s the matrix of far-flung allusions. There’s the intimate knowledge of popular culture laced with highfalutin theory in a distinctly non-highfalutin manner. There’s the smart and unexpected reversals. There’s the humor.

But Sweet Heaven When I Die is, first and foremost, a book about loss, about death, transience, neglect, and quitting. These are the recurring themes in almost every one of the book’s thirteen chapters. The loss of the American west to real estate developers, the loss of a beloved uncle to a meaningless war, the killing of veteran activist Brad Will in Oaxaca in 2006, the neglect of the Yiddish language and its masterful authors, or the devastation of a writer failing to find an audience. In one chapter, Sharlet notes that all things we become invested in and pin our identities on have a half-life. With his consciousness of the inevitable decay befalling all things, Sharlet proves he has taken Cornel West’s lesson of the “death shudder” to heart. “To learn how to die in this way,” Sharlet quotes West in a chapter on the philosopher, “is to learn how to live.” And although the final chapter of When I Die is called “Born, Again,” Sharlet resists the temptation to end on an upbeat note, leaving us instead with a blues note.

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