Packed with elegant aperçus and vibrant with the author’s rueful understanding that “Naples the glorious and Naples the...
From novelist/essayist/editor Taylor (The Book of Getting Even, 2009, etc.), an idiosyncratic, atmospheric portrait of “the great open-air theater of Europe.”
Once considered Italy’s pleasantest city, second only to Rome in importance, Naples today is as noted for its dire poverty and malevolent Camorra crime syndicate. “Its residents know themselves by instinct to be different from other European citizenries,” writes Taylor: “more ancient, less well-off, more skeptical, less clean. But wiser, grander.” Those sentences resonate with the author’s attractive blend of romanticism and realism as he plumbs Naples’ Greek roots and the pagan sensibility that still underpins its Catholic surface. Taylor’s scope is as all-embracing as the stroll he takes around the Bay of Naples. He connects the magnificent wall paintings in the Villa of Poppaea with Italian art of the 15th century. He notes his “fear and dislike” of Christianity “because it sets the flesh against the mind and denies the brevity of our expectations; because, in a word, it is so un-Greek.” Taylor finds Neapolitans of every generation deeply Greek in their tragic sense of life, borne out by centuries of foreign domination, climaxing with the brutal Nazi occupation in the final years of World War II. The author wears his formidable erudition lightly as he cites classical authors and 20th-century travel writers such as Norman Douglas with equal zest and acuity. Yet some of his most enjoyable pages are present-day encounters with a fervently communist doctor, a chain-smoking student of Faulkner and novelist Shirley Hazzard, one of Naples’ many devoted longtime, part-time residents. Though this is a highly personal book, the Neapolitan spirit is palpable: “the being-visible-now, the quasi-divinity that flows from a fundamentally theatrical sense of life,” as Taylor puts it in a characteristically ecstatic, evocative assessment.
Packed with elegant aperçus and vibrant with the author’s rueful understanding that “Naples the glorious and Naples the ghastly have always been one place.”Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15917-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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