Powerful exploration of underexamined relationships between labor, culture, and the urban future.
Original, engrossing discussion of emerging class, race, and gender transformations in post-industrial urban America.
Rotella (English/Boston Coll.) utilizes unorthodox structure and focus to good effect here; this consists of long essays on four unique urban environments and a particular subculture within each, creating a greater portrait of American cities on the cusp of change. He is sympathetic to the information-age dilemmas of the working class, writing about “sure-handed characters who . . . make culture, a form of work in itself.” He utilizes this idea of cultural production to explore the historical environments enveloping his central figures. In Erie, Pennsylvania, he writes about the ascent of Liz McGonigal, a “compact and graceful” champion in amateur woman’s boxing, exploring both this sport’s strange collision of aggressive athleticism and sexual archetypes and the Erie boxing scene’s connection to the town’s hard-bitten industrial tradition (itself down but not out). The most engaging section focuses on Chicago guitarist Buddy Guy, who in his 50-year career has witnessed and profited from the blues’ transformation from an entertainment of and for the city’s African-American South Side into a valued tool of civic boosterism consumed by mostly white blues-rock enthusiasts. Rotella’s most unusual ideas develop in considering two eccentric New York City detectives whose work during the “urban crisis” (c. 1965–70) influenced The French Connection and numerous other films and TV shows, essentially creating the post-1970 cultural idea of crime and the underclass. Equally thought-provoking is his closing chapter on the clash in Brockton, Massachusetts, between landscape artist Patricia Johanson, who purchased native son Rocky Marciano’s decaying house as part of a project to honor him, and the city’s political establishment, which cooled on Johanson’s proposal for reasons including their wish to attract high-tech investment. Although Rotella sometimes reverts to the abstracted terminology of cultural-studies journals, serious readers will appreciate his enthusiasm, sharp observations, and the overall narrative’s meandering wit.
Powerful exploration of underexamined relationships between labor, culture, and the urban future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-520-22562-7
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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