Slow going at times, but with some fascinating characters and anecdotes.
From the author of England’s Dreaming (1992), a dense cultural history of adolescence from 1875 to 1945.
Savage’s choice of timeframe for this work makes the point that the concept of adolescence as a separate stage of life is not recent. To demonstrate how different Western nations have conceptualized and utilized youth, he draws on diaries, newspapers and magazines, novels, movies, advertisements and psychological and sociological literature, particularly G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume 1904 work, Adolescence. Savage opens with fervid entries from the diary of an imaginative, articulate Russian teenager living in France, followed by the flat statements of a 15-year-old Massachusetts youth who committed a series of horrific murders, both recorded in 1875. These polar opposites, the author argues, “showed that it was no longer adequate to think that adulthood immediately followed childhood; they were the harbingers of a new intermediate state that as yet had no name.” Savage then follows the twists and turns of youth culture through seven decades, examining urban gangs, the Boy Scouts, socialist and religious youth groups, young soldiers embittered by their role as cannon fodder in World War I, the Roaring ’20s exuberant jazz babies and Nazi Germany’s militaristic Hitler Youth. In the United States, awareness of adolescence coincided with the growth of the mass media and the rise of consumerism; youth styles were spread by movies, radio, magazines and ads. Savage analyzes the impact of such real and fictional characters as Baden-Powell, Peter Pan, Dorian Gray, Rudolph Valentino, even the murderous Leopold and Loeb. In conclusion, he points to adolescents’ economic clout and asserts that the postwar spread of American values has been spearheaded by pleasure-seeking teenage consumers. While Savage focuses on the young, he paints a broad social and cultural portrait.
Slow going at times, but with some fascinating characters and anecdotes.Pub Date: April 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03837-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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