An engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the...
A political and pop-cultural view of midcentury America in relation to the enigmatic life of a Texas-bred political journalist and novelist.
Outside of Texas and certain literary circles, Billy Lee Brammer (1929-1978) may not evoke the cult recognition shared by his contemporaries, such as Ken Kesey or Tom Wolfe. In this entertaining and colorful new book, fiction writer and biographer Daugherty (Emeritus, English/Oregon State Univ.; Let Us Build Us a City, 2017, etc.) goes a long way toward elevating Brammer’s status. He also offers a generous glimpse into the political and personal life of Lyndon Johnson. In the mid-1950s, Brammer started working as a staff writer for Johnson, then a Texas senator, after gaining Johnson’s attention with favorable articles he wrote while an editor at the Texas Observer. Together with his first wife, Brammer maintained a demanding schedule, and he developed what would become a lifelong dependence on amphetamines, sustaining him while he also worked on his fiction. Eventually, these efforts led to his groundbreaking 1959 novel, The Gay Place. Focusing his central character largely on Johnson, Brammer’s only published novel encompasses three related novellas. Together with fellow natives such as Larry McMurtry, Brammer would alter the narrow backwoods perception of Texans. “His arch storytelling style seemed unique,” writes Daugherty, “because other writers had not yet exploited Texas’s rich hypocrisies—the bad behavior of its politicians and religious leaders. Demographically, Texas became more urban than rural in 1950. A decade later this population shift was producing striking cultural changes. Brammer was the most sophisticated, most literary example of a Texas boy from an essentially rural background to adopt an urban lifestyle, to loosen his grip on the culture’s cherished traditions, to explore the latest fashions, gadgets, art, and music.” His increasing drug dependency, which overtook any further writing ambitions, served to firmly position him within the center of the evolving 1960s counterculture movement, as he explored various underground venues and encountered such icons as Janis Joplin.
An engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the 20th century.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1635-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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