An eye-opener for those who remember the ’60s; for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as...
Rich in yippie/hippie goodness, a scrapbooklike biography of the agitator and gadfly who went from the barricades to Wall Street—and ticked everybody off at every point along the way.
Mention the word “yippie” to a person of a certain age, and the first person who comes to mind will most likely be Abbie Hoffman. That’s not quite fair, writes music and pop-culture journalist Thomas (Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, 2012, etc.): “Abbie was a fan of Jerry before Jerry even knew Abbie existed.” Active in leftist politics since the early 1960s, Rubin (1938-1994) was a Zelig of dissent, everywhere at once, influential to everyone he met—including soon-to-be-former Beatle John Lennon and a re-emerging Bob Dylan. Rubin was also one of the Chicago Eight, a guy with an FBI file a foot thick, under suspicion for every sort of mayhem, including a presumed threat to lace the water supply of the Windy City with enough LSD to send every Chicagoan on an intergalactic trip. (Here, Thomas helpfully fact-checks: “it would take five tons of acid to effectively contaminate the water supply,” showing just how outlandish the government’s investigations could get back in the day.) As the author writes, sardonically, Rubin was so controversial that his prep school didn’t invite him back for the 25th anniversary—but enshrined him as one of the class heroes at the 50th, by which time he had come back from living underground and become an investment banker, earning the enmity of many erstwhile comrades. Things did not end well for Rubin, author of the famed take-it-to-the-man countercultural manifesto Do It! Thomas’s oversized, overstuffed book, studded with photos and news clippings, charts that unlikely trajectory, noting, sympathetically, that “no matter who Jerry was at any given moment…it was never a put-on.”
An eye-opener for those who remember the ’60s; for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as illustrated through one of its most memorable personalities.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60699-892-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
