by Jenny Diski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009
Though Diski sounds melancholy notes (“young is a phase the old go through”) and closes on a note of resignation, her...
A slender meditation on the 1960s—part of Picador’s Big Ideas/Small Books series.
British novelist/memoirist Diski remembers the ’60s very well. If her British experiences do not always line up with those of Americans, there are abundant parallels. “The Sixties,” she writes, “were an idea in the minds, perhaps even more powerful than the experience, of those who were actually living through them.” In her experience, that idea broke down into many compartments, including the intellectual and artistic. She recounts being turned on to the works of Ginsberg and Kerouac, of course, but also Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Neruda, Joyce, Brecht, Weill and Beethoven, as well as Buddy Holly and the Beatles (“though I was disdainful until Rubber Soul came along”). The idea was political as well, and here Diski is particularly sharp, noting the apparent ingratitude of a generation whose parents suffered depression and war only to raise children who would reject the world that had been made for them. But only for a while. Diski is also sharp—and sharp-edged—about the rise of an entirely different mode of being in the ’70s and ’80s, when ecstatic hippies became egomaniacal yuppies and the politics became truly ugly, as all the government-off-our-backs rhetoric of the antiwar movement converted into the self-serving Hobbesianism of the libertarian crowd. An overreliance on drugs didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt as much as the just-say-no types would have it, either. Writes the author, for the benefit of the uninitiated, “What happened when you smoked a joint and to a far greater extent when you dropped acid was that the world outside your head was utterly changed.”
Though Diski sounds melancholy notes (“young is a phase the old go through”) and closes on a note of resignation, her elegant book might inspire readers—and not just those who were there—to try to remake the era anew.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-42721-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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