An absorbing stroll down a potholed, rubble-strewn memory lane with a leading left-wing journalist. The late Kopkind (Decade of Crisis, not reviewed, etc.), a regular contributor to stalwarts like the Nation and more ephemeral publications like Hard Times and Ramparts, possessed both the hard eye of the streetwise reporter and the historical depth of a scholar. This highly unusual combination is everywhere evident in this anthology of his work, which begins with the civil rights movement in the Deep South in the early '60s and ends with gay- rights activism in New York City in 1994. Reading through Kopkind's literate reporting, one revisits flashes of recent history: the ``morality playlet'' of Joe Namath's forced resignation from professional football for owning a bar in which gambling took place while the owner of the New York Jets owned a racetrack in New Jersey and put big money on the Super Bowl; Janis Joplin's dawning awareness of her lesbianism and the effects that self-knowledge had on her soon-to-end career (``even her death is not her own; it merely extends the metaphor''); the abundant hypocrisies attendant at the Woodstock festival (``an environment created by a couple of hip entrepreneurs to consolidate the culture revolution and extract the money of its troops''); Pee-Wee Herman's big misadventure in a Florida porno theater (``don't think you can survive as a rebel, however hilarious, in TV's well-fortified cultural garrison''). Whether writing of the machinations of Black Panthers and Green Berets, the Bay of Pigs, the Stonewall riots, disco, or modern literature, Kopkind commands extraordinary grace and vision—and an extraordinary ability to delight and rile at the same moment. Shelve this collection next to the best writings of I.F. Stone and H.L. Mencken in that great library of books that torment the comfortable.
Pub Date: June 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-85984-902-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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