In an evenhanded and well-tempered book, stuffed with a sterling cast of interviewees adding their voices to his, Brokaw...
Veteran newscaster Brokaw (A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland, 2002, etc.) turns in proof positive of the theory of relativity: Arlo Guthrie and Dick Cheney inhabited the 1960s at the same time.
Guthrie and Officer Obie—aka William J. Obanheim, longtime Stockbridge, Mass., chief of police made famous in the folk singer’s epic 1967 protest song, “Alice’s Restaurant”—became friends in the end: Guthrie noted, “He was a wonderful, wonderful human being.” It is doubtful that Arlo will warm up quite so well to Karl Rove, another child of the ’60s who insists that his intervention in the matter of Terry Schiavo was advocacy for the disabled. Rove spent the time far from the rigors of Vietnam; so did Cheney, who spent the time drinking up a storm and concluded, his own radical freak flag flying, “Close elections don’t mean you trim your sails in terms of your agenda.” Brokaw is respectful—after all, you never burn a source—but twits Cheney for his preference for the retrograde ’50s, when DUIs were cool and “homosexuality and race were easy targets for bigots.” The author confesses that his own service in the ’60s wasn’t exactly idyllic, as he garnered fat paychecks as a newsman in Los Angeles while his brothers did time in uniform (he tried, but flat feet kept him out). He gives space to some of those who enjoyed similarly soft circumstances, such as Warren Beatty, who took a break from the ’68 Democratic Convention by partying at the Playboy Mansion. Brokaw is more inclined to hang with more serious players, such as Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, who says of Vietnam, “That war . . . tore the heart out of our country.” Capably painting the contours of the time and its many issues, Brokaw even admits a little fondness for Richard Nixon while getting close to what a well-placed source (whom he doesn’t identify until 400 pages into the book) calls “the code”—the real message of the ’60s.
In an evenhanded and well-tempered book, stuffed with a sterling cast of interviewees adding their voices to his, Brokaw does a nice job of trying to crack the code.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6457-1
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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