Clarity, humor, polished writing, and an engaging narrator make for an enjoyable read.
An Iowa college student discovers a new life filled with sex and adventure in this debut memoir by Hamit (Meltdown, 2012, etc.).
Excerpted from a much longer, forthcoming memoir, this book focuses solely on Hamit’s experiences while attending the University of Iowa in the 1960s, just as the Vietnam War gathered steam from the U.S. perspective. Fleeing a rough two years at an unidentified Bible college, Hamit blossomed at his new school and found himself enthralled with theater work, photography, playwriting, poker, and women. But Hamit’s time was taken up by more than just the distaff side of the college population. In a strange twist, he started working as an off-the-books undercover informant, looking for leads to help stem the tide of LSD and other drugs that Hamit viewed as harmful (“Knowing the risks, I stepped up and made a deal with the cops. Leave my friends alone, and I will give you the dealers”). Several of the women he was involved with were drug abuse survivors. He acquired a Walther pistol that he planned to carry only at night (“I might well have to kill someone if things got sticky and they came at me”). As one might expect, these different pursuits collided in unexpected and sometimes-dangerous ways, and Hamit ended up with an unusual, multifaceted education. Given that Hamit has made a living as a writer since his college years, readers should be unsurprised to find his prose smooth and confident, nailing the tenor of the times with verve while exploring the exultation and heartbreak of a young man discovering the dimensions of his character. While his days weren’t all filled with peace and love—besides his undercover activities, Vietnam War service lay in his future—Hamit’s voice remains cleareyed and optimistic. There’s no melancholy or darkness in his outlook, even when recalling grim events. There is, however, a lot of sex in these pages, so those uncomfortable with adult situations, including frank, though nonpornographic, descriptions of various acts, may wish to look elsewhere for their memoir reading.
Clarity, humor, polished writing, and an engaging narrator make for an enjoyable read.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 91
Publisher: Brass Cannon Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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