An adroit paean to thrift, lasting value, and the bargain ethic.
Journalist Botha (Apartheid in My Rucksack, not reviewed) explores the ingenious (or sheerly wacky) art of sifting trash.
Growing up in South Africa, Botha was captivated by how people would convert other people’s garbage into “toys, ornaments, houses, even entire suburbs.” When he moved to New York, he saw something of the same in the time-honored tradition of the young furnishing their apartments with goods from the curbside. Call it “mongo” (any discarded item retrieved and rescued) or call it adventure or addiction among the street farmers, the urban survivalists, the Dumpster divers, but little did Botha know how deep the process ran. Fortunately, the author is a tough guy who doesn’t mind working at night—mongoing is mostly a furtive act, not to mention illegal, since all trash is the property of the department of sanitation—and so he got to run with the very best of the gleaners, the mongo-folk who do their bit to alleviate the city’s refuse problem. In a subdued, reportorial style, Botha manages to keep a steady voice as he details the pecking order of the mongoists, among them the black-bag slashers, a “lumpen proletariat” of pickers who rank even lower than the sewer-sludge (feces) probers. Botha’s favorites seem to be the anarchists who subsist on discarded food, hunters and gathers who take their slogan “Food Not Bombs” to new heights. But he also likes the folks who sift through landfills, who certainly uncover some fascinating stuff, from a Revolutionary War–era tricorn hat to a 1939 Superman Ring of America. Magazines, catalogues, playbills, and books are specialty items: Philip Roth will be unhappy to hear that a first-edition Portnoy’s Complaint will net at best $50, while Hunt for Red October can bring its discoverer $1,000.
An adroit paean to thrift, lasting value, and the bargain ethic.Pub Date: June 28, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-452-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Those who missed them in Playboy, The New Republic, and other media can catch up with culture diva Paglia's latest performances here. The special effects are as spectacular as ever; the act, however, is getting old. As in her previous collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture (not reviewed), Paglia fills this volume with every magazine piece of hers from the last few years, transcripts of her TV appearances, an annotated bibliography of media references to her, and even a section of cartoons in which she was featured. Paglia's production is like a three-ring circus. There's competent journalistic cultural criticism on one side, encompassing appreciations of figures like Sandra Bernhard and Amy Fisher, and reviews of books by Madonna and Edward Said. Paglia's well-publicized polemic against feminist and gay movement dogma, which continues here, hasn't gained any subtlety. Her loose use of the opprobrium ``Stalinist'' will strike those misguided readers who take her essays on ``culture war'' topics seriously as genuinely offensive. In another ring, there's batty scholarship. A long essay written especially for this volume offers a ``pagan theory of sexuality'' for the contemporary world. Those seeking rigor will be warned off by the fact that Paglia's title for this piece is taken from dialogue in the movie Ben Hur. The really compelling action comes in the center ring, where the carnival of Paglia's construction of her own persona never stops. Her straightforwardly autobiographical writing is brilliant. One moving memoir celebrates the formative influence on her of four gifted and rebellious gay male friends; another hilariously revisits the promise and the pomposity of the Susan Sontag whom the young Camille Paglia idolized. Inspired by Sontag, Paglia exclaims that ``we need more women stars who can run their own studios!'' Paglia herself has become a star, and as such she inevitably fascinates. But she often seems miscast as an intellectual leader, mirroring as she does another aspect of her image of Sontag: ``no argument, only collage.''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-75120-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)—Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years—Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier’s own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le’s brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Frazier’s remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about “us” as “them.” (Photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22638-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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