A balanced history—sometimes admiring, sometimes blistering—of the writers who fractured the glass capsule of literary...
The co-authors of The Trials of Lenny Bruce (2002) return with a sharp-edged history of the Beats.
Collins and Skover, both law professors (Univ. of Washington and Seattle Univ., respectively), focus on the notables of the movement. William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti enjoy the most space, but we also learn about the friends, lovers and criminals swept along in the artists’ wakes—though it’s sometimes questionable whose wake is transporting whom. Early on, Collins and Skover emphasize the lawless culture that attracted the artists: the drugs, drinking, violence, thefts and infidelities that found the Beats in and out of trouble (and jail and mental institutions). The authors begin with a fatal stabbing, introduce us to Herbert Huncke (junkie, hustler, thief) and describe a serious car accident that propelled Ginsberg into an asylum. Then another death—that of groupie Bill Cannastra in a reckless subway stunt—and another: junked-up Burroughs, in a William Tell moment, shooting his lover in the head. Throughout, Neal Cassady jumped from woman to woman. “It was a world,” write the authors, “where, by and large, men were verbs and women objects.” The last half of the volume deals with Kerouac’s long struggle to publish On the Road, Ginsberg’s publication of and ensuing obscenity trail for Howl and Other Poems and Burroughs’ legal problems with Naked Lunch, all of which occurred somewhat simultaneously. Collins and Skover handle the various trials and legal issues with aplomb, and by the end, they soften their criticisms of the Beat lifestyle—though they do suggest, more than once, that Ginsberg, traveling in Europe during the Howl trial, left some San Francisco friends in a precarious position.
A balanced history—sometimes admiring, sometimes blistering—of the writers who fractured the glass capsule of literary conformity.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938938-02-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Top Five Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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