A top-flight interpretation of a time, its music and its strange doings—which still look pretty good compared to now.
A fan’s lucid notes on a time when the hope or fear, depending on one’s viewpoint, of “a violent assault on the established order” occupied minds, megaphones and microphones.
British chronicler Doggett (The Art & Music of John Lennon, 2005, etc.), who is just old enough to remember the ’60s, is comfortable looking at the time through a kaleidoscope and reporting his visions in straightish lines—not easy, given its myriad madcap qualities. Among his exhibits: Allen Ginsberg, who wondrously declared that he would use language to end the Vietnam War (“The poet says the whole war’s nothing but black magic caused by wrong language & authoritatively cancels all previous magic formulas & wipes out the whole war scene without further delay”); Black Panther strategists who studied the lyrics of the man they called Bobbie Dylan as if Talmud, trying to penetrate the honky mind; Abbie Hoffman, howling “Fuck Lyndon Johnson! Fuck Robert Kennedy! And fuck you if you don’t like it!” to an audience of well-groomed liberals. The era made lots of people crazy. On the other hand, it snapped some into sanity, as when, in a marvelous moment, Doggett finds MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer and singer-songwriter Tim Buckley stumbling into downtown Detroit during a race riot: “My first reaction was just like any red-blooded American kid: ‘Oh boy, a fire!’ But then I remembered what time it was in America.” Doggett dodges through the decade, noting that the Jefferson Airplane members were a pretty conservative lot (listen to “Crazy Miranda”) and giving Paul McCartney wry props for sort of making an effort at being political with his song “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” which “was less incendiary than Lennon’s contributions to the debate, and even more banal.” Indeed, Doggett does not unduly lionize the rockers who stuck their noses into politics; as future media mogul David Geffen said when asked whether his clients were being monitored, “I don’t think Nixon cares very much.”
A top-flight interpretation of a time, its music and its strange doings—which still look pretty good compared to now.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84767-180-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance...
A showcase of the work of activists and participants in the Stonewall uprising, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary.
With his discerning selections, editor Baumann (editor: Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, 2019, etc.)—assistant director for collection development for the New York Public Library and coordinator of the library’s LGBT Initiative—provides a street-level view of the Stonewall uprising, which helped launch the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. Through his skillful curation, he offers a corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the event sometimes termed “the hairpin drop heard around the world.” By gathering vibrant and varied experiences of diverse contributors, the collection reflects the economic, gender, racial, and ethnic complexity of the LGBTQ community at a time when behaviors such as same-sex dancing were criminalized. Featuring essays, interviews, personal accounts, and news articles, Baumann’s archival project accurately and meticulously captures an era of social unrest; the conversation about institutional discrimination and inequality presented here remains as revolutionary today as it did 50 years ago. The anthology invites us to look closely at the unresolved social dynamics of a population defined by its diversity, confronting sexism, racism, classism, and internalized homophobia alongside a broad view of institutional discrimination, heteronormativity, and sexual repression. Voices of significant leaders sit beside stories from participants behind protest lines, police raids, and street harassment, and the mounting frustration with an oppressive status quo becomes palpable on every page. The first-person narratives collected here effectively spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community, many of which persist today.
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance and Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History for a full education on the events before, during, and after Stonewall.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313351-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.
A sharp explanation of how American politics has become so discordant.
Journalist Klein, co-founder of Vox, formerly of the Washington Post, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, reminds readers that political commentators in the 1950s and ’60s denounced Republicans and Democrats as “tweedledum and tweedledee.” With liberals and conservatives in both parties, they complained, voters lacked a true choice. The author suspects that race played a role, and he capably shows us why and how. For a century after the Civil War, former Confederate states, obsessed with keeping blacks powerless, elected a congressional bloc that “kept the Democratic party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.” Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many white Southern Democrats became Republicans, and the parties turned consistently liberal and conservative. Given a “true choice,” Klein maintains, voters discarded ideology in favor of “identity politics.” Americans, like all humans, cherish their “tribe” and distrust outsiders. Identity was once a preoccupation of minorities, but it has recently attracted white activists and poisoned the national discourse. The author deplores the decline of mass media (network TV, daily newspapers), which could not offend a large audience, and the rise of niche media and internet sites, which tell a small audience only what they want to hear. American observers often joke about European nations that have many parties who vote in lock step. In fact, such parties cooperate to pass legislation. America is the sole system with only two parties, both of which are convinced that the other is not only incompetent (a traditional accusation), but a danger to the nation. So far, calls for drastic action to prevent the apocalypse are confined to social media, fringe activists, and the rhetoric of Trump supporters. Fortunately—according to Klein—Trump is lazy, but future presidents may be more savvy. The author does not conclude this deeply insightful, if dispiriting, analysis by proposing a solution.
A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0032-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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