“For years now, when I cannot sleep,” writes Cole part way through this sharp, passionate collection, “I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk.” Within a few paragraphs the writer, photographer and critic has swept past the Tasmanian tiger, the 1966 Nigerian coup and the Holocaust and is on to a video of a ferry disaster in Bangladesh: perhaps unsurprisingly, sleep does not come. Cole’s essays touch on Abraham Lincoln, Snapchat, Ivan Vladislavić, WG Sebald, Tomas Van Houtryve, Saul Leiter, Malick Sibidé, Virginia Woolf and Tamir Rice, the breadth of reference made accessible by his vigorous enthusiasm and precise language. There are repeat guests – Cole returns several times to James Baldwin’s trip to “a small Swiss village that had never seen a black man” and considers Barack Obama via jubilant election day street parties and a litany of drone strikes. He bonds with writers, mountains, cities and an airfield-obsessed cabbie, and talks of race, art, terrorism and strange coincidences. It’s rare to find a book that engages so fruitfully with both high culture and world we live in: to read it is to find gems in strange and familiar places.
