An invigorating plunge into the sexual, intellectual, and artistic ferment of the enclave that nurtured 20th-century artists...
Longtime Village Voice theater editor Wetzsteon (1932–1998) celebrates with wit, insight, and love the political radicals, poets, painters, and just plain eccentrics who lived and worked in Greenwich Village during the first half of the 20th century.
The roster of rebels who moved through the Village’s approximately four square miles in those years, alternately partying and charging the cultural and political barricades, includes names that are carved firmly in America’s artistic heritage and others that reverberate only among political activists. Socialists, Marxists, anarchists, and others fomenting political change held sway in the years preceding WWI, among them John Reed, Louise Bryant, Max Eastman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman. They met to eat and drink and talk—always talk—in socialite Mabel Dodge’s salon on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. Wetzsteon presents his history in lively chapters devoted to these and other idiosyncratic personalities, including Eugene O’Neill, Edna Millay, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Djuna Barnes, e.e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Dawn Powell, Jackson Pollock, and lesser-knowns but perhaps no less important to the Village myth. One of the most evocative chapters concerns Joe Gould, a Harvard graduate (made semi-famous by Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker profile) who spent his life on the streets of the Village, always in need of a bath and a meal, allegedly compiling An Oral History of Our Time. Villagers’ lives overlapped in unexpected ways, defining a “community obsessed with individualism, independence, self-expression, and self-fulfillment.” Sexual relationships were a core issue, Wetzsteon believes, because what drew people to the Village was the opportunity for sexual freedom. When the 1960s opened the doors to sexual liberation coast to coast, the Village, for the most part, lost its usefulness.
An invigorating plunge into the sexual, intellectual, and artistic ferment of the enclave that nurtured 20th-century artists and writers whose work and lives still resonate in the 21st.Pub Date: June 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86995-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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