by Dean Kuipers ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2006
An excellent look at the marijuana subculture, deluded or not, aspiring to the Middle-American mainstream.
The story behind the FBI raid on a Michigan farm that could have become the next Waco or Ruby Ridge—except that 9/11 intervened.
On September 9, 2001, Los Angeles–based journalist Kuipers read a newspaper article about the killing of two men by FBI sharpshooters at a southwestern Michigan campground, following a standoff that ran over the Labor Day weekend. Two days later, when people confronting the FBI were suddenly perceived less like defenders of their constitutional rights and more like terrorists, the story was dropped flat by most news media. Kuipers, however, had grown up near tiny Vandalia, Mich., and knew that smoking pot in the state was a misdemeanor, enforcement rare. “The shootings . . . smelled funny the moment I read about them,” he writes; he decided to follow up. For years, he relates, owner Tom Crosslin had groomed Rainbow Farm as a campground, meeting place and concert venue specifically for users and proponents of the legalization of cannabis. “Festivals,” usually dubbed something like Roach Roast or Hash Bash, were regular events; name artists performed for enthusiastic, presumably stoned audiences. The author goes to some lengths and generally succeeds in showing how the outlying conservative rural community, while hardly in favor of legal pot or post-hippie lifestyles, could tolerate Crosslin, his much-younger male lover Rollie Rohm and their crowd on the simple basis that what they did was their own business in a free country. But the county prosecutor’s office had other ideas. When Crosslin and Rohm were caught with a few cannabis plants growing in the basement, they were threatened with outright forfeiture of their property and possible prison time. Defaulting on their court date, the two armed themselves and prepared to burn Rainbow Farm to the ground. Was it spontaneous escalation, or did the War on Drugs go so far as to incorporate murder?
An excellent look at the marijuana subculture, deluded or not, aspiring to the Middle-American mainstream.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59691-142-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Dean Kuipers
BOOK REVIEW
by Dean Kuipers
BOOK REVIEW
by Dean Kuipers
BOOK REVIEW
by Dean Kuipers
by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ludwig Bemelmans
BOOK REVIEW
developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
BOOK REVIEW
by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
BOOK REVIEW
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Share your opinion of this book
More by Charlayne Hunter-Gault
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.