An engaging sampling of articles from a hip, confrontational newspaper.
In this nonfiction collection, journalists Dreyer, Embree, Duncan, and Bishop assemble notable work from a Texas-based countercultural periodical.
The 1960s was a golden age of independent journalism in America, providing fresh, alternative perspectives on such topics as the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture. AsJohn Moretta, the author of The Hippies: A 1960s History(2011), states in his introduction to this book, “No one can write a thorough history of the 1960s without an in-depth discussion of the importance of the emergence and proliferation of…the underground press.” From 1969 to 1972, the newspaper Space City! filled that niche in Houston, speaking for the bohemian scene in what was then one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. This book, edited by former staffers, collects some of the paper’s finest pieces of journalism, opinion, humor, and cartoon work, covering a slew of topics, including electoral politics, the Mexican American Youth Organization, local concerts by the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, and hard-hitting investigations into such local institutions as the Houston Chronicleand Rice University. Sometimes the paper became a subject in its own reporting, as when a conflict with members of the Ku Klux Klan led to the bombing of the Space City!offices. The book serves as a time capsule for a distinct American moment, not only in its accounts of historical events and cultural shifts—some famous and some forgotten—but also in its highlighting of the language and mindset of the paper’s young, often radical staff. “In 1969, there was such a thing as a ‘movement’; there was a burgeoning counterculture that seemed at times almost on the verge of ‘taking over,’ ” writes reporter Victoria Smith in the paper’s final issue, adding that “for people like us it was simply Life.” It’s this blend of timeless and of-the-moment material that makes the book such a compelling document, because even in less notable pieces, readers can feel the writers trying to find the voice of their era.
An engaging sampling of articles from a hip, confrontational newspaper.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-312-16267-9
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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