Latter-day heads—as well as “relentless dabblers” and the historically minded—will enjoy this well-researched, mind-altering...
A history of the interplay between hallucinogens and rock music in the innocent minds of young America.
Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, felt guilty about that achievement because, among other things, he worried that getting a clear view of the universe would keep youngsters away from church, where they belonged. But when acid hit the streets of California, the kids turned to the church of rock ’n’ roll—and, more to the point, the church of the Grateful Dead, the heroes of rock journalist Jarnow’s (Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, 2012) book. In a time when Charlie Manson was lurking right around the corner, they were there to spread lysergic sunshine across the land. “The happy apolitical psychedelic world unfolds like a patch of greenery wherever they go,” writes the author, reveling in the historic present to describe events of a half-century ago. Manson, yes, and capitalism: hucksters always surrounded the Dead, trying to cash in on their craze and “franchise [the] very concept” of being…well, heads. Jarnow has a bloodhound’s sense of the marrow of an argument and the meat of historic fact: no one else has so clearly pointed out the path that led from Garcia’s old lady to the “delicious seedless pot” that turned smoking a joint into a gasket-blowing trip. The author is also dogged in tracing the psychedelic activism of Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley, and company over the decades into the present, with weird and shadowy groups preaching the acid gospel. Though Jarnow is sometimes unduly celebratory and sometimes begs credulity—is the fact that we use emoji on our mobile phones really evidence that the psychedelic revolution carried the day?—his book is a lot of fun to read, and it absorbs its own weight in excess reality. And reality, he reminds us, is always a lot weirder than anything drugs can cook up.
Latter-day heads—as well as “relentless dabblers” and the historically minded—will enjoy this well-researched, mind-altering excursion.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82255-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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