A lively sampling of unabashedly left-wing commentary from scholar/journalist Wiener (History/Univ. of California at Irvine). Dealing primarily with the academic and pop-cultural manifestations of contemporary political and intellectual debates, these 42 articles, essays, and reviews, published between 1974 and 1990 in such journals as The Nation (where the author is a contributing editor) and The New Republic, offer a cleareyed, surprisingly balanced, and consistently readable view of an alternately comic and alarming battleground. At his best (a series of articles masterfully disentangling the furious efforts of leading deconstructionists to explain the anti-Semitic collaborationist writing of the late Paul de Man; an account of the bizarre ``vendetta'' against Marxist historian David Abraham by mainstream academics), Wiener uses straightforward reportage to expose the absurd posturings of self-righteous ideologues. Regrettably, his own devotion to ``moral issues'' brings the author perilously close to tripping over his own political correctness. Thus, while pieces on such knotty university issues as striking a balance between free-speech guarantees and protecting victims of verbal abuse serve as thoughtful considerations of difficult questions, a group of essays dealing with right-wing and left-wing academics degenerates into an endless parade of predictable bad guys (Daniel Boorstin, Allan Bloom, Shelby Steele) versus the reliably radical good guys (Jesse Lemisch, Derrick Bell, Eugene D. Genovese). At the same time, as a keen observer of mainstream culture, always alert to ``paradox and irony,'' Wiener delivers an unexpectedly affecting reconsideration of Frank Sinatra as brokenhearted activist (``When Old Blue Eyes was `Red' ''), along with a chillingly funny visit to the Nixon ``Liebrary'' (a ``twisted trip down memory lane'') and a peek at the frightening saga of FBI surveillance of John Lennon (since 1981, the author has been trying to obtain the complete Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act). Insightful and frequently engaging, though hobbled by the lack of a comprehensive introduction and by some thematic and factual repetition.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-86091-356-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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