A fine return to form for Klosterman, blending Big Ideas with heavy metal, The Wire, Batman and much more.
Of John Rawls and Keith Richards: Klosterman (The Visible Man, 2011, etc.) returns with a pop-culture–laden meditation on the bad guys of the world and what they mean.
Philosophers call it the “problem of evil.” Though he holds down the lofty post of ethicist for the New York Times Magazine, Klosterman’s take is guided less by the wisdom of the ages than his own gut feeling. In the linked essays here, he’s grappling less with supervillains such as Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot (though both figure) than with such less-fraught specimens as Snidely Whiplash, of Dudley Doo-Right fame, and Morris Day, who dared oppose Prince for the love of a righteous woman and top stakes in the battle of the bands. That most of his subjects are from the pop-culture realm, whether Andrew Dice Clay or Chevy Chase or the Eagles, does not diminish the underlying sophistication of Klosterman’s guiding questions: Why is it that grown-ups are more comfortable with the grays of a black-and-white world while being drawn to the dark side of the force? Which is to say, why do kids love Luke Skywalker while adults secretly cheer for Darth Vader? Well, not all adults do, of course—just as not all adults will forgive Klosterman his roundabout defense of Newt Gingrich as a Very Bad Guy who doesn’t give a monkey’s backside for what other people think of him. Still, there are some fruitful exercises in the author’s brand of such forgiveness: quantifying, say, who was to blame in the Monica Lewinsky affair (“The larger vilification was ultimately split five ways. Mr. Clinton, of course, was first against the wall”) and running through the moral calculus to determine whether, à la Jeffrey Lebowski, we should not all deem the Eagles the most evil band in history—as, it seems, we should.
A fine return to form for Klosterman, blending Big Ideas with heavy metal, The Wire, Batman and much more.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8449-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
PROFILES
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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