Norman remains a national treasure, and his fans must be grateful to his son for convincing the old man to sit down and...
Reflections, rants and racy ruminations by the octogenarian author of The Naked and the Dead and other gems of American literature, interspersed with occasional questions and comments from his 27-year-old son, who is wise enough to know which of Mailer’s thoughts are of greater interest.
Many of the pieces in this eclectic collection are edited transcriptions of conversations between the Mailers; a few are previously published essays and speeches. NM and JBM have a lot on their minds: the current Bush White House; how many hard punches boxer Jose Torres took in his career; 9/11; Iraq; fascism; the number of gods there are in the universe. Their exchanges are generally genial, though Mailer père sometimes reminds Mailer fils that he is young and just doesn’t get it. The only conversation that contains any real friction is about marijuana, a subject upon which both men claim authority. The conversations are chockablock with NM’s wit, certitude and, at times, gender cluelessness. He observes that the Bush administration holds great faith in the stupidity of the American people, that the feckless Democrats deserved to lose in 2004, that sex with many women is instructive. He fires again across the bow of New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, whom he once called “a one-woman kamikaze.” Here, he modifies the kamikaze part: “They, at least, were brave, whereas she may not have the outdoor guts of a pissant.” He makes some striking comments about writing, crediting Hemingway for teaching him about the “tensile strength of a sentence,” and some provocative ones about existentialism and Sartre. Both father and son worry that the days of the serious American novel are over, leaving us with only “the Big Empty.”
Norman remains a national treasure, and his fans must be grateful to his son for convincing the old man to sit down and answer a few questions. His answers are illuminating, annoying, amusing.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-824-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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