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
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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