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
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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