Well written and full of firsthand insight—a good companion to weightier studies such as Timothy Miller’s The 60s Communes...
If you can remember the ’60s, you may have been there—but as a very young person, as this thoughtful history reveals.
Joni Mitchell once said that we’ve got to get back to the garden, and tens of thousands heeded; in the years surrounding Woodstock, communes sprouted like mushrooms across America. Born to back-to-the-landers but now a denizen of Brooklyn, Daloz writes with firsthand knowledge of the good and bad of these wishfully self-reliant places. The good is obvious: young people built rural lives away from the urban grind, reinvigorating the countryside and laying the foundation for our current devotion to organic and healthy foods. The manifold bad included culture clashes with rural people: “Hippie newcomers,” writes the author, “sometimes fell afoul of locals by not understanding—or ignoring—essential customs.” Communes were also subject to old-fashioned sexism imported from home, with the women doing the brunt of the work unappreciated, and to invasion by bikers, dealers, addicts, runaways, and drifters, adding to the tension and instability. Among Daloz’s case studies are The Farm, still thriving in Tennessee, and Drop City, the Colorado commune celebrated in T.C. Boyle’s novel of the same name, built on the “philosophy that it was possible, amid the extravagant excess of American society, to live richly and well on others’ refuse.” A literary scholar and teacher, Daloz also examines the long history of communitarianism in America, reflected in the works of Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other writers. She carries her investigations into the present, noting that even though the heyday of the 1960s and ’70s commune movement has long passed, the ethos endured, with “radical social experiments in group living…replaced by individual families’ radical experiments in self-sufficiency—including my family’s.”
Well written and full of firsthand insight—a good companion to weightier studies such as Timothy Miller’s The 60s Communes (1999) and Arthur Kopecky’s Leaving New Buffalo Commune (2006).Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-225-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
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
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
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