Light reading on often heavy topics.
A collection of short essays about American subcultures by New York Times Magazine contributor Denizet-Lewis (America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, 2009).
The author first gained recognition for his front-page feature in NYTM about black males in the “down low” culture—masculine, closeted men who indulge their taste for gay sex through secret societies. The full article is included here and supplemented by a shorter piece on white men who have attempted to join the club in recent years. A gay man who looks and dresses younger than his age, the author used these particular traits to gain access to honest interviews from people in a range of off-center groups, ranging from wildly successful preteen extreme athletes to self-proclaimed lipstick lesbians. The book is divided into two sections of eight chapters each, “Youth” and “Sex,” though these themes frequently appear in tandem, as in the essay on the plight of gay homeless youth in San Francisco. The book is similar in intent to Susan Orlean’s The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (2001), but Denizet-Lewis lacks Orlean’s provocative blend of distance, commentary and wit. The writing style is adequate but does not dazzle, and the author spends too much space on some topics—such as the recent crackdown on drinking in fraternities—at the expense of other subjects that could use more depth of analysis. Although Denizet-Lewis doesn’t fulfill his promise to throw wide the doors on secret, largely sexual subjects, there is enough of the underground and the subversive to pique the casual reader’s interest. Perhaps one of the author’s goals is to show how ordinary many of his supposedly extreme interviewees can be in conversation, which makes the peculiarity of their respective situations seem decidedly less strange. This motivation is a demonstration of integrity in journalism, but it tends to deflate the voyeuristic pleasure for the reader.
Light reading on often heavy topics.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3915-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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