An engaging if overstuffed work that describes the tools performers use to create a lasting effect.
A professor of sociology and the humanities investigates many forms of performance, from theatrical to political.
Sennett, who began his latest book as right-wing demagogues came to power, notes that the most distressing of them was Trump, whose “malign performances...draw on the same materials of expression as do prayers, Bach cantatas or the ballets of George Balanchine.” By comparison, he cites a Roman god and states that “art made in the good spirit of Janus focuses on process rather than a finished and fixed product.” Drawing on extensive research and his experience as a cello player, Sennett “considers the unsettling, ambiguous, dangerous powers of performed expression.” In these far-ranging pieces, the author touches on the importance of ritual; cites Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting in stating that “the less deeply a performer feels, the more they can make an audience feel”; notes the troubling phenomenon of dramatized violence that is “larger than life,” like the ridiculous outfits people wore during the storming of the U.S. Capitol, which “can be accepted, and enjoyed,” thus inuring people to a tragedy’s severity; details the ways in which demagogues manipulate audiences by “playing on their hurt”; and shows how expertise at staging, as with Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington, can be “a challenge to power.” Sennett’s examples are so wide-ranging—from commedia dell’arte to Noh theater, Hannah Arendt to Merce Cunningham—that he sometimes obscures his central thesis, but that doesn’t diminish the power of much of the text. Many details are unforgettable, as when he writes that a problem in the early days of enclosed theaters is that they stank: “People bought chicken wings and sausages from roving vendors, and peed in the plentiful pissoirs located in the corridors.”
An engaging if overstuffed work that describes the tools performers use to create a lasting effect.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780300272901
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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