An insightful biography that paints provocateur extraordinaire Abbie Hoffman as the paradigm of the 1960s. Raskin (Communication Studies/Sonoma State Univ.), a longtime confederate of Hoffman's, writes against a handicap: His obligation as a biographer is to make sense of Hoffman's life, but Hoffman's genius was in creative nonsense, in thumbing his nose (and other parts of his anatomy) at just such attempts at intellectualization. Indeed, descriptions of Abbot Howard Hoffman's upbringing in a middle-class Jewish household in Worcester, Mass., and his early attempts at family and career seem so out of sync with his later, radicalized persona, that readers new to Hoffman might wonder why such a boringly normal guy deserves a serious academic biography. But Raskin, wisely, does not attempt here to capture the essence of Hoffman's antiestablishment theatrics. Instead, the author presents Hoffman as the quintessential 1960s figure: ``The arc of his biography intersected with the trajectory of history.'' Hoffman understood better than most leftists that America had entered a media age where linear ``thoughts were out; icons and images were in,'' and he knew what outrageous forms would get the most coverage in the media—such as throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Ö la Jesus and the money changers at the Temple. Hoffman, in his ability to call attention to America's injustices and discontents, embodied the triumphs of the '60s. And then, Raskin argues, his 1989 suicide, at age 52, epitomized its failures. Madison Avenue coopted the movement's symbols, and ``radicals and hippies . . . fell into the ranks of respectability.'' The cultural, generational, nonideological revolution waged by Hoffman and his fellow Yippies simply could not be sustained outside the context of the 1960s. Raskin's Hoffman is as flawed and compelling, brilliant and obtuse as the America against which he protested. Raskin puts Hoffman into his American context and offers fascinating insight into both. (25 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-520-20575-8
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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