Abbie Hoffman, cut and pasted—and so made whole. This Edie-style oral biography by Howard Stern collaborator Sloman (also the author of Thin Ice, not reviewed, etc.) consists of hundreds of quotations from dozens of interviewees, including Hoffman, who died in 1989. The assembled cast includes Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William Kunstler, Tom Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy, Jerry Rubin, Grace Slick, and Hoffman’s siblings, parents, wives, and children. Hoffman, a Worcester, Mass., native and sexually experienced Brandeis student in the 1950s went on to become an organizer in Mississippi for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Later, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, he fell in with the Diggers, a group of actors-turned-activists, soon thereafter gaining his first major exposure with future Yippies co-leader Jerry Rubin at a photo-op money-burning at the New York Stock Exchange in 1967. As Art Goldberg puts it, after his trial for his role in the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots, Hoffman was more than a radical, he was a media celebrity. Later, he befriended John Lennon and Yoko Ono, became an outlaw and a hustler, and drifted into drug-dealing. Busted in the ’70s, he went underground for much of the decade. Sloman’s choice of the oral biography technique, on one level an exceedingly lazy, and sometimes confusing, approach (the reader is given zero context for most speakers or their comments), comes to seem an eminently reasonable device for writing the life of the radical activist and author whose own literary works tended to aspire toward “anti-books.— Readers will feel for Hoffman’s son, America, who after his father’s death wished he could just talk to Abbie, man to man. And Ginsberg neatly analyzes the subject’s legacy when he says Hoffman’s idea for social revolution was premature, noting that its fruition came in eastern Europe 20 years later. Through sometimes contradictory voices and fractured perspectives, Hoffman as a person, with his moral strength and personal vulnerabilities, slowly—and surprisingly—comes into a sort of focus. (40 b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-41162-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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