Norman Mailer might well place Ockham's adage above his desk: "Entities are not to be multiplied unless necessary." For in his latest collection of journalistic pieces "written in the years of the plague," and of "poems called short hairs," there is little which is not ultimately repetitive, fustian, muddy. Johnson, the Kennedys, Vietnam, Lindsay, Mary McCarthy, Hemingway, even the celebrated Republican Convention coverage printed in Esquire—each essay has its brilliant moments, each is pulverized in a carnage of highbrow cliches, ringside rhetoric, the indulgence of an invincible ego. Lodge "looked like they had been beating him in the kidneys with his own liver." "Goldwater had all the homely assurance of a filthy sock." In these strained pages we are admonished that "we live in a time which has created the art of the absurd." Mailer riffles every contemporary nerve, from psychic ills and existential dread to the obligatory apocalyptic vision, the release of limitless emotional possibilities. Orating on Mount Pisgah, Mailer comes to us as rebel, prophet, conscience of the age, "gentleman gangster." But more than the self-inflation, it is the self-befuddlement which is so truly saddening. The tastlessness of the verse ("One cannot give a funeral service to the fart/and yet there are broken winds which walk the plank in pride") rivals the imaginary interviews, Mailer's dialogue with his mirror, rubbish about mood (in the Heideggerian sense) or about the philosophic aspect of ingestion and elimination. The wisest, strongest comments are on literary matters; alas, they seem marginal to Mailer's concerns. His response to life is increasingly theatrical. Humorlessly striving for a mystic orgy, wasting a huge talent, Mailer reads like some middle-aged volcano spewing burning issues for the young.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1966
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1966
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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