‘Who is AOC?’ the back cover of this book asks. ‘A wack job!’ says Donald Trump. ‘She needs to run for president when she turns 35,’ Cardi B explains. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in America. She goes by her initials (like FDR and JFK) and is
a Latina from the Bronx and Westchester, with no background in policy making, a bartender. She has a boyfriend; she uses social media to communicate with fans and fight with political foes, and also to cook ramen noodles in front of millions of people while chatting with them about structural inequality and mass incarceration. And every one of these things winds up meaning so much.
Take Up Space is a ‘kaleidoscopic biography’, assembled by the editors of New York magazine. The 32-year-old’s life takes up 200 pages and there are 22 additional, multimedia chapters, including a comic strip of her trip to ‘a “concentration camp” at the Border’, a copy of the speech she gave to Congress ‘On Being Called a F*cking B*tch’ and a two-page close-up photograph of her mouth.
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