Young wrote two kinds of articles, reviews and social commentary. In the former category are the reviews collected here of Hunter S Thompson, Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Brett Easton Ellis, Alice Munro, Greil Marcus, Alice Hoffman, Dennis Cooper, TC Boyle, David Callard, Poppy Z Brite, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Terry Prachett, Christopher Wood, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, Will Self, Michael Bracewell and Robert Harris. Her reviews are incisive and learned both in literary and cultural terms, for instance in her writing on the Celtic renaissance of the 90s which included Warner and Welsh she sees clearly the anti establishment ethos of writers disenchanted with the misrepresentation of Scotland as all about tartan, shortbread and beautiful landscape searching for a way to speak of their world of desperately low expectations, drugs, of isolation from society and of their own culture.
Her other articles take these themes on in a more direct fashion, challenging and lambasting the current 'war on drugs' government and society attitude to illegal drugs that replaced the 'British system' of prescribing to addicts and has resulted in massive gang warfare, illegal trafficking, and death and maiming from the adulterated drugs themselves and supposed solutions such as methadone. She speaks from within the affected society and the urgency of her calls for change are informed by this.
But Young is also funny and witty, this is a good collection that made me think. And I have found two other people that are sure they are a gay man trapped in a woman's body, I thought I was just nuts...
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