A journey that loses its way on the road to significance.
The thin chronicle of a cross-country trip modeled on John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.
When Barich (A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub, 2009, etc.) revisited the 1962 classic and decided it was ripe for an update, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Most readers remember the travelogue as comic in tone, but Barich found much of its social commentary not only bleak but prophetic. So he committed himself to a two-month, 6,000-mile drive across the country, avoiding cities and major highways as much as possible while trying to take the pulse of the country on the eve of a pivotal presidential election. Unfortunately for the reader, too much of what the author offers as discovery is obvious to the point of cliché. A California hippie in the 1960s who has spent nearly a decade in Ireland, he learns on his return to his homeland that many conservatives not only listen to talk radio but parrot the likes of Rush Limbaugh. “In an earlier century, they’d have been selling snake oil,” he writes of airwave propagandists. He finds an America overrun by chain operations and malls—“repetitiveness robs travel of its essence. There’s nothing to discover”—yet he also finds some good fishing here and there, some natural beauty (particularly in Colorado) and some tasty meals in regional restaurants. Most of the places he visits merit little more than a page, while some are dispensed in a paragraph. When he moves from the specific to the general, the results can be glib: “Often I think Mexicans know something I don’t. They seem to have an ease of being I envy. I can’t remember ever meeting a dour Mexican in California—nasty, yes, and even obnoxious, but never dour.” He sees challenges and contradictions in the American ethos, but ultimately proclaims that he is “more hopeful than Steinbeck.”
A journey that loses its way on the road to significance.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1754-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
Strong language and strong medicine about the decline of the American economy, but marred by overwrought prose and Monday- morning quarterbacking. Rowen, a columnist for the Washington Post, attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. It is, he says, a case of ``self- strangulation.'' Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Without attributing any venality (other than perhaps the playing of partisan politics) and admitting that people did the best they could, he nonetheless does assign blame for the low economic state to which the nation has sunk. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. Rowen ignores JFK, whom he knew personally and who arguably set in motion events leading to the problems Rowen cites. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Ford and Carter were hamstrung by OPEC and were, according to the author, nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics,'' with its vain hope that wealth would trickle down from the top. Rowen also attacks Congress, describing it as spineless. For the future, he says, Americans will have to adjust to the economic rise of Asia, focus on high-tech industries, and become less greedy. Rowen's case is compelling, if not totally convincing. He also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-1864-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-3411-0
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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