An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history.
Grateful Dead biographer McNally examines the origins of the hippie counterculture in the post–World War II era.
The epicenter of American bohemia has always been San Francisco, where in the late 1940s “a thread of artistic discourse focused on freedom coalesced into a subculture.” Though he disavowed the beatnik label that would come in the next decade, the center of this subculture was the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, McNally holds, practiced an anarchism “in which the personal is political,” certainly a belief that would take root and then later flourish in the hippie and anti-war movements. (As McNally correctly notes, “hippie” is a media coinage: The hippies proudly called themselves “freaks.”) McNally takes his discussion to Los Angeles, never quite hip but “fertile ground for nonmainstream religious and occult thinking”; he extends it further to Greenwich Village, where a tougher-edged bohemian movement was rising. Well versed in the history of the era while not exactly breaking new ground, McNally locates some of the climacterics of the counterculture in works such as the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still, the satirical writings of Paul Krassner, and particularly Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which “simultaneously foreshadowed and helped to propagate the values of the youth culture of the 1960s.” He might have done more to make that connection more explicit, but McNally ventures a number of useful observations, including the heavy-handedness of the police as a kind of spur for rebellion and the continuing influence of the 1960s in the first years of the computer revolution, suggesting that its birth in the San Francisco Bay Area was for good reason: “The atmosphere of the Haight and LSD imparted a vision of computers that served individuals.” He sounds a hopeful chord in the thought that while the dream of the ’60s may be dead, “the dreaming continues.”
An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780306835667
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
