Keenly observed and moving.
Well-crafted look at the wrenching experience of the youngest of the “Little Rock Nine.”
In the fall of 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education ordered the desegregation of all U.S. public schools, 14-year-old Carlotta Walls (now LaNier) signed up to be among the first black students at previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. This naïve, earnest decision would affect every facet of her life, as well as the lives of her family and neighbors. Coached and encouraged by the local NAACP branch, ten students attempted to attend Central High, only to be turned back by an ugly mob and the Arkansas National Guard, dispatched to encircle the school by staunch segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus. As lawsuits pressed by Thurgood Marshall and other civil-rights lawyers were pursued, President Eisenhower dispatched federal paratroopers to avoid “anarchy” and accompany each of the nine students (one had given up) to their classes. “Getting inside Central was just the beginning,” remembers the author; now she faced “a brand new struggle: finding a way to survive.” The daily abuse, both verbal and physical, caused intense stress; LaNier’s memoir vividly depicts the students’ and their families’ blistering struggles. Faubus illegally closed down all the area high schools during the ’58-59 school year (“the Lost Year”), and the violence worsened; Walls’ home was bombed. She left Little Rock for college and a career, loath even to mention her involvement for many years. Finding her voice, as she notes, came much later, and this hindsight account suggests that the nation still has not achieved closure about the painful events at Little Rock.
Keenly observed and moving.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-51100-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Nation Washington editor Corn delves thoroughly and with gusto into the career of Ted Shackley, one of the more shadowy CIA agents of the Cold War period. Shackley was the child of a broken home, son of an immigrant woman who bequeathed him his fluent Polish, a skill that landed him his first counterintelligence job in postwar Berlin. An intense but informed and intelligent patriot, he entered the CIA at its inception in 1947. His career, therefore, mirrors the development and fortunes of the agency itself. Shackley was in Miami to orchestrate assassination attempts on Castro; he was in Laos to organize the covert war against the Pathet Lao; he was in Vietnam, where, from his office in the Saigon embassy as chief of the East Asia Division, he earned the nickname ``Blond Ghost.'' (In 1975, back in the States, as he watched TV images of the embassy evacuation, his 11-year-old daughter found him weeping—a rare moment of emotion for a man portrayed here as cold, balanced, and ruthless.) Corn sounds a note of recrimination throughout this biography, which somewhat unfairly lays at Shackley's door such fiascos as the posting by an agency employee of a CIA-forged letter from a Thai Communist rebel to the Thai government in an attempt to foster divisions within that country's left (it was traced back to the CIA and caused a storm of anti-American protest in Thailand). The book might have benefited from the perspective of Shackley himself, who did not consent to be interviewed. By his own admission, Corn has used Shackley's career to open a window into the world of intelligence, and his book succeeds more as an account of the CIA's workings in general than as a portrait of one agent. A fairly absorbing read about the CIA, though the special significance of its protagonist isn't really established.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-69525-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An inspired look at how ideas are disseminated by the media and at how new concepts can be injected into the mainstream, altering views about critical social issues. The ``datasphere,'' says culture critic Rushkoff (Cyberia, not reviewed), is the new territory of human development, a region as ``open as the globe was five hundred years ago.'' Discounting fears that new media will remain the province of corporations and governments, Rushkoff maintains that they're too complex and chaotic to be controlled by any one force. In fact, he asserts, the media replicates much like biological forms and can be manipulated to hasten our evolution. This book is a guide to empowerment through media activism; it shows how progressive notions are ``injected'' into the media—often with careful premeditation—via television programs like ``The Simpsons'' or through the recreation of events like the Rodney King beating on programs like ``L.A. Law.'' Rushkoff interviews young meta-media theorists who develop ``designer viruses'' such as the ``Smart Drugs'' public relations campaign (which works to legalize drugs the FDA forbids) in order to ``infect'' public thinking. And he shows how attempts to control the media can backfire, as happened in the 1992 Republican presidential campaign. The book has its problems: A helter-skelter style sometimes undermines the rigor of otherwise persuasive arguments, and Rushkoff is so enthusiastic about the positive power of everything from daytime talk shows to MTV that he barely acknowledges their negative effects. A more critical perspective— or an examination of the media activism of the Christian right or other cultural forces—would have given his study a critical edge it lacks. But this book will convince many that the counterculture is alive and well—and more widely dispersed than ever. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38276-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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