Veteran international correspondent Laufer, who covered the Eastern bloc revolution for ABC and CBS, here offers images, anecdotes, and conversations with ordinary citizens that give a fuller flavor of how the prospect of freedom affects individuals. A San Francisco-based journalist who spent much of the last three years covering Eastern Europe, Laufer was present in Berlin when the Wall came down and later loaded up a camper and toured all of the Communist countries in Eastern Europe (except Albania). At pains to help the Western reader see and feel the differences among these countries, he nonetheless finds many common elements: the grayness and dilapidation of once-noble capitals, the tiny cars that take two years' wages to buy, the absence of goods in the stores. The overall obsession with obtaining Western goods is a theme that Laufer reiterates time and again: ``Until Eastern Europeans get their chance at Barbies and Slurpies, Big Macs and Nintendo, and all the other junk the West offers, who can expect them to spurn it?'' His images touch on the political: Berlin punk rockers with purple hair spikes, the extreme of anarchism, who still won't cross the street against a red light. Laufer describes a series of lovable hustlers who find ways to exploit currency gaps between East and West, such as two Polish auto mechanics who work in West Berlin and live in Poland like kings. Throughout, those he interviews ponder whether real change will follow Communism's collapse, or whether only the faces and slogans of leaders will change. Well-crafted travel guide and an informative complement to Anthony Daniels's Utopias Elsewhere (p. 834). (Sixteen pages of photos—not seen).
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1991
ISBN: 1-56279-015-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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