A vigorous, compelling American history.
The history of a flourishing 19th-century village that gave rise to transformative thought.
Conceived as a sequel of sorts to Gross’ acclaimed The Minutemen and Their World (1976), this book is a deeply researched inquiry into the idea of individualism as expressed and grappled with by the two most famous transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, among many others in 19th-century New England. Drawing on prodigious scholarly and archival sources, Gross creates a vibrant portrait of Concord, Massachusetts, as a thriving village that, from the 1820s to the 1840s, confronted evolving intellectual, economic, social, political, and spiritual pressures as well as contentious issues that drove townspeople “into mutually suspicious enclaves,” frayed bonds of community, and undermined an “ideology of interdependence” inherited from the Puritans. In the 1820s and ’30s, Concord prospered, with factories producing cloth from cotton picked by Southern slaves; a pencil factory, owned by Thoreau’s family; a circulating library, debating club, and lyceum; bustling shops; and, notably, the exclusive, influential Social Circle, “a self-selecting club of the local elite,” open only by nomination (Emerson proudly joined in 1839). Gross’ large, colorful cast of characters includes conflicting religious leaders, such as Congregationalist Ezra Ripley and Calvinist Lyman Beecher; African American artisans, Irish immigrants, and local farmers; and reform-minded women who energetically took up the cause of abolition, to which Emerson—unlike Thoreau—came late. Thoreau, Gross writes, “captured the driving forces of the day,” including the invasive “iron horse” (Emerson, unlike Thoreau, was an early supporter of the railroad and bought railroad stock), modern communications, the need for better schools, and “the moral and spiritual failures of church and state, the problematic programs of the reformers, and the loss of wildness in nature.” Gross incisively examines Emerson’s “masculine version of individualism,” which was offensive to his wife; Thoreau’s apparent retreat from social life; and both men’s changing conception of the individual within a matrix of social obligations and sustaining community.
A vigorous, compelling American history.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-27932-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence.
Cultural and intellectual history of Marx’s engagements with the U.S., and the following he found.
Karl Marx, historian Hartman writes, was fascinated by the U.S. as “the nation most committed to the economic and social systems formed by capitalism.” He had fleeting hope that his concept of freedom as encompassing economic independence would find a home in the U.S., even as Abraham Lincoln—who, casual readers might not know, was the subject of much of Marx’s work as a journalist writing for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune—also hoped that “workers might break free of capital and work for themselves.” The alignment had enough points of difference, of course, to separate Lincoln’s Republicanism from Marx’s socialism and communism. Marx supported the Union and Lincoln in particular during the Civil War, if for nuanced reasons: He was adamantly opposed to slavery, “a product of his firm belief that abolition was an essential step toward working-class emancipation.” That is, slavery and wage slavery were not so far apart. Marx’s optimism faded as Andrew Johnson, whom he called “excessively vacillating and weak,” undid the higher goals of abolitionism during Reconstruction. Hartman goes on to examine how thinkers such as C.L.R. James and political figures such as Franklin Roosevelt interpreted Marx’s thought in later years, the former in his radical history of the Haitian war of independence, the latter in shaping some of the planks of the New Deal—for, as Roosevelt said, “There is no question in my mind…that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.” With the recent rise of populism and nationalism, Hartman concludes at the end of his era-by-era survey, it might be time again. As he writes, echoing Marx, “What do we have to lose?”
A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780226537481
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.
A comprehensive memoir from a famous but humble spiritual seeker.
Mention the name Ram Dass (1931-2019), and you’re likely to hear three words: Be Here Now. However, there’s much more to the man born Richard Alpert than his best-known book, as this posthumous memoir, co-written with Das, makes amply clear. Born just outside of Boston to an ambitious Jewish family, he quickly became a hungry spiritual seeker. He ran with fellow Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, and together they became pioneers in hallucinogenic research. As he explains, psilocybin and LSD, which were legal when he began his studies, were a means of exploring other planes of consciousness, a rationale that didn’t keep him from getting fired for turning on an undergraduate student. One can imagine such a book by another author—say, Leary—as full of chest-puffing and war stories. Thankfully, on his road to enlightenment, Ram Dass also accumulated a good deal of humility. This comes across clearest in the sections that find him in India, where he became a disciple of the Hindu guru Maharaj-ji, who taught the young American pilgrim how to love and worship without using drugs—and gave him his new name, which means “servant of God.” “Turning toward Eastern spirituality was not just my inner evolution but part of a major cultural shift,” writes the author, who proves to be a steady guide to some heady events and trends, including the Harvard psychedelic tests, the communal living experiment in Millbrook, New York, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and the influx of Westerners flooding India in search of a higher state of being. Familiar names walk in, walk out, and often return: Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and the members of the Grateful Dead.
Ram Dass lived a full life and then some. His final statement is thorough and, yes, enlightening.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68364-628-0
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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