Vivid and informative—a must for anyone interested in 20th-century American publishing and culture.
A posthumous memoir nicely captures the Grove Press publisher’s free-wheeling ways and rebel heart.
Presented by the Rosset estate with a memoir that had been “pruned to death,” OR Books founder John Oakes, who worked at Grove in the 1980s, went back to the archives and added material that better represented the boss he describes as “either brooding, laughing, or raging.” That charismatic man practically leaps off the pages of these salty reminiscences, which begin with a tribute by Rosset to his gamekeeper-assassinating Irish great-grandfather and the assertion, “Rebellion runs in my family’s blood.” Young Barney’s radical tendencies were evident even before he wrote a paper on Henry Miller’s then-banned novel, Tropic of Cancer, at Swarthmore College in 1940. (He got a B-minus.) Tropic of Capricorn was one of several books, most famously Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that the maverick Rosset published and defended in court to challenge outmoded obscenity statutes still on the books in the 1950s. The resulting Supreme Court decisions opened the door to a more adult American culture, and Grove Press was at the forefront of putting it into print—and on film, with I Am Curious (Yellow), a 1967 Swedish movie that in Rosset’s assessment hardly deserved its scandalous reputation but certainly provided an income that supported Grove’s more literary and less lucrative offerings. Rosset’s commitment to keep his authors’ complete works in print meant that the profits from steady sellers like Waiting for Godot often got swallowed up by the costs of publishing Samuel Beckett’s fiction, for example. The court costs of the censorship cases kept Grove’s finances shaky and ultimately led to Rosset’s ill-advised sale of the company to British magnate George Weidenfeld and American heiress Ann Getty in 1985. Characteristically, Rosset follows up an acid depiction of his subsequent ouster with a tribute to Grove’s “Other Nobelist” (after Beckett), Kenzaburo Oe; for this fiery idealist, it was always about the writers.
Vivid and informative—a must for anyone interested in 20th-century American publishing and culture.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68219-044-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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