This book skillfully uses the struggles of a Michigan official to convey the contradictions that derailed the 18th Amendment.
An author and playwright offers a panorama of family life in a Detroit suburb set against the backdrop of Prohibition.
Commire (co-author: Breaking the Silence, 1990, etc.) casts a Great Lake–sized net in this monumental book she completed before her death in 2012. Not only does she delve deeply into the lives of her maternal grandparents and their seven children, one of whom was her mother, in the hardscrabble town of Ecorse, Michigan, but the author also explores Prohibition, which her grandfather tried to enforce as a justice of the peace and later as police chief. The result is an almost Thomas Wolfe–ian blend of historical facts and novelistic dialogue based on Commire’s extensive research. While it may intimidate some readers with its length and density, the volume deftly captures a large slice of American life with incredible details. At the heart of the story are two principal characters—family patriarch George Moore, who presided over court hearings in the barbershop that provided his main source of income, and the community of Ecorse. Due to its location just across the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario, Ecorse became a mecca for vice and bootleggers, including Moore’s own teenage son. At night, the author reports, “tight-lipped gangsters in face-shading fedoras or snap-brimmed hats walked the same street where children had played hopscotch just before dusk.” Commire is particularly adept at showing the paradoxes that made Prohibition so ineffective: “The Eighteenth Amendment encouraged the corrupt and contaminated the clean.” Moore was an exception to the rule of civic corruption. “What an awful time to be living,” he lamented. “All this stuff could tempt Mother Cabrini.” He also realized the futility of enforcing the law, noting that because of “all those years of loose talk” in his barbershop, “knowing what I know, I’d have to arrest half the town.” But ultimately, he got swept up in a scandal by agreeing to arrange for a bribe to a local politician to keep Moore’s son out of jail. At the end of the book, Commire’s mother remembers the town of her youth, “the promise, the pain, the laughter—mostly the laughter.” The author’s singular achievement is to bring all of that alive.
This book skillfully uses the struggles of a Michigan official to convey the contradictions that derailed the 18th Amendment.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9976458-5-9
Page Count: 586
Publisher: Onion River Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
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