The Decade I Argued With Everyone

He moved to Washington to begin his career. Instead, he found himself living through history-and arguing about nearly all of it.

In September 2001, Raywat Deonandan had a newly defended doctorate, an award-winning book, and a job waiting in Washington, DC. Then planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The adventure he had imagined became something else entirely.

Against a backdrop of anthrax letters, racial profiling, the Beltway sniper attacks, and the expanding War on Terror, a young scientist and writer tried to make sense of a world changing faster than he could understand it. His response was to write.

The Decade I Argued With Everyone brings together essays and reviews published between 2000 and 2010, framed by personal reflections on the experiences that shaped them. Moving between Guyana, Toronto, Washington, and the wider world, Deonandan explores identity, empire, science, culture, and belonging-from the politics of international conflict to the unexpectedly revealing pleasures of professional wrestling.

These are arguments made while events were unfolding, before their consequences were clear. Some judgments proved prescient. Others became difficult to defend. Together, they trace the formation of a public voice and a life increasingly entangled with global affairs.

By turns combative, funny, intimate, and self-questioning, this collection offers a personal account of the early twenty-first century: its fears, its promises, and the arguments through which we tried to understand it.

For readers of literary memoir, cultural criticism, and political essays, this is one man's record of finding his place in a turbulent world-and rarely keeping his opinions to himself.