Of prurient politicians and pulsating presidents.
Having earned renown as a pornographer and as a champion of First Amendment rights, Flynt moves onto slightly more scholarly turf by recruiting professor Eisenbach (American History/Columbia Univ.) to the cause of studying all the naughty stuff about our leaders. The result is something of a set of salacious index cards, not really connecting to anything except passing the test—presumably, that test being the reader’s ability to titillate an audience at the next cocktail party with juicy details about Dolley Madison’s derriere and Eleanor Roosevelt’s fondness for Sapphic threesomes. What’s that, you say? Well, Dolley was known in her time for bestowing kisses and much, much more on the powerful men of her day, calming down just a little after marrying future president and well-known drag James Madison. But, but, a reader familiar with those fine denizens of Montpelier and the Executive Mansion will object, that’s not true. Right, admit the authors: “Although the tales of Dolley’s rampant promiscuity are not true, the story of how they got started provides insight into how this one woman rocked the political world of the young Republic.” And so most of this book is a collection of saucy gossip guaranteed to thrill an impressionable eighth-grader. The authors’ general strategy is to present this gossip as fact—for how could one sell dirty stories about Lincoln, Eleanor, and even J. Edgar otherwise—and only then to backpedal to what everyone knows, which is that Bill Clinton was a horndog, James Buchanan a walker on the wild side, J. Edgar a walker in women’s pumps, etc. Meh. If you’re not up on the sex life of, say, Millard Fillmore, then you might learn a thing or two here. Otherwise, this book mostly titters and snickers at the back of the class.
Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-10503-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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