A powerful and relevant account of greed, gentrification, housing insecurity, and collective action.
An activist and journalist recounts the story of a mass eviction of tenants from a Los Angeles apartment complex in this nonfiction book.
Located in the Venice neighborhood of LA, Lincoln Place apartments provided affordable housing to middle-class families on fixed incomes for a half-century, with many of the residents in the early 2000s having lived there for decades. Protected by LA’s rent control laws, the complex’s tenants tended “to stay put once they had moved in,” as rents for new housing skyrocketed in Venice starting in the 1980s. Then, one day in December 2005, just weeks before Christmas, Lincoln Place’s 65 adults and 21 children were suddenly evicted from their homes in the “largest single-day lockout in Los Angeles history.” The locks on their doors were changed that very day, and they were only allowed to come back to retrieve their possessions after signing up for a two-hour time slot approved by the property’s management. Using the brute force of the sheriff’s department to enforce the evictions, Lincoln Place had found an apparent way around the city’s stringent rent control laws. The complex utilized a loophole in the Ellis Act, which allowed for mass evictions if the landlord removed all residences from the rental market. A housing activist from Venice, Hathaway tells the story of the building’s tenants with a passionate, righteous indignation, from their harrowing eviction and homelessness to their tenacious, decadelong legal battle with the property’s corporate owners. As a journalist whose work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the author is a skilled storyteller and pays close attention to the legal minutiae of both sides in the Lincoln Place trials. And while his independent research through newspaper accounts and trial records is impressive and is backed by ample citations, the strength of the volume comes from interviews with the tenants themselves and direct eyewitness accounts. At nearly 460 pages, the book is at times unwieldy, but in an era when the price of housing continues to rise, it tells a timely and important story.
A powerful and relevant account of greed, gentrification, housing insecurity, and collective action.Pub Date: July 15, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 543
Publisher: Crania Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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