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
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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