Though many of the articles collected here illuminate the surfaces of popular culture, the best of them go deeper into the heart of America.
Most of these essays are reported pieces, some of them profiles (of musical artists Bunny Wailer and Axl Rose), others long-form feature stories (on a Christian rock festival, reality TV, the Tea Party revolt). Yet New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, 2004) is always inherently a part of these stories, conscious of himself as an observer and of his perspective as an interpreter, though never gratuitously or self-indulgently intrusive. As a writer for publications ranging from GQ to the Paris Review (where he is the southern editor), the native Kentuckian now living in North Carolina shows his familiarity with what one piece terms “the tragic spell of the South,” whether he’s writing about his complicated relationship with a literary mentor or rekindling memories of an evangelical past while bonding with believers at a music festival. Throughout, he recognizes the danger of “a too-easy eloquence,” and his appreciation of the “unknowable” Michael Jackson in particular challenges a facile understanding. As is usually the case in such collections, some of the pieces are slighter than others, though none seem journalistically dated. Even “At a Shelter (After Katrina)” comes alive on the page through the vividness of its sensory detail. Sullivan’s ambition is evident and suggests that he has a much bigger book in him, whether he’s examining “a historical portal [where] you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute” or contemplating “the future of the human race” (hint: It involves a war against the animal world, which may have some scientific basis or may be a flight of fantasy). Mostly impressive work from a writer who frequently causes readers to challenge their own perspectives.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-53290-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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