Longtime politics and culture writer Gitlin (Journalism and Sociology/Columbia Univ.; Undying, 2011, etc.) looks at the insurgent Occupy protest movement in the United States.
The ongoing Occupy movement effectively began on Sept. 17, 2011, when a small group of protesters, calling themselves Occupy Wall Street, set up camp at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The protesters supported a wide array of left-leaning political causes, mostly addressing economic inequality. They soon received media attention, and their numbers grew quickly, as Occupy protests proliferated in cities around the country and world. As Gitlin points out in this relatively brief “initial report on something very much in progress,” the movement has been a huge media success, spreading discussion on economic issues and injecting the term “occupy” and the phrase “the 99 percent” into the national conversation. A veteran of New Left protests in the 1960s and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Gitlin effectively places Occupy in context in the history of American progressivism. At times, he seems ambivalent about how the movement is run. Though he approvingly writes about how its lack of leaders and vague goals have helped to make it more appealing and inclusive, he also laments the interminable meetings of fractious and dogmatic Occupiers accomplishing little or nothing concrete. While Gitlin champions Occupy’s “incandescent compound of indignation, joy, outrage, hope, ingenuity, and resolve,” as well as its nonviolence, he has little insight as to what exactly the movement will accomplish going forward (“Prediction is for fools and the jaded”), an uncertainty apparently shared by many inside the movement.
A fine introduction to a nascent movement in progress, characterized as one with great potential but an undetermined future.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-230093-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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