Readers with a memory for the time will appreciate some of Lerner’s dish, which involves other now-well-known radicals....
A rueful—but not entirely so—account of years spent in the Students for Democratic Society and its militant offspring, the Weather Underground.
Lerner, now enjoying a quiet, small-town life with his husband, came to radicalism, like so many others of his generation, as a result of the Vietnam War. As an Antioch student in 1967, bookish and born into a liberal Jewish family, he fell in love with the shock tactics of guerrilla street theater. We might call it performance art today, but suffice it to say that setting a life-sized mannequin ablaze and then proclaiming that the conflagration is the suicide of an anti-war student is a good way to capture attention. “Nowadays,” he writes on a get-off-my-lawn note, “doing something like this on the campus of a liberal arts college might be found objectionable for not being preceded by a trigger warning.” From there, the author was on to the Weather Bureau, which evolved into the Weathermen and then the Weather Underground as its members, having gone on to rob banks and bomb draft boards, fled from the law. With admirable candor if not admirable behavior, Lerner positions himself as a revolutionary compromised by sure desire to keep out of trouble, willing to endorse the most drastic actions but not necessarily to get his hands dirty. As he writes, having gone underground all the same, “fear can be a disincentive to action. Shame, on the other hand, as I came to know well, can be a great motivator.” With a dawning awareness of himself as a gay man with other battles to fight (“in those days admitting to being gay was an enormous humiliation”), Lerner distanced himself from a movement that disintegrated in the mid-1970s.
Readers with a memory for the time will appreciate some of Lerner’s dish, which involves other now-well-known radicals. Those too young for it will find inspiration in his latter-day commitment to tiny acts in the face of Armageddon.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-682190-98-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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