Levy’s wasn’t-it-a-groove closing chapter gets at only half the story that he has otherwise documented so well, of a scene...
The vitality of London in the swinging ’60s—and the pathetic, sordid underbelly of it—ably conveyed by Levy (King of Comedy, not reviewed, etc.).
Three forces were at work in turning staid England on its head, writes Levy: “Bohemians in Chelsea and Soho; radical leftists from the universities and in the media; teens with spending money” (this last very important, for the upsurge in the British economy was the quiet partner to this romance). Londoners had a war-and-recovery toughness, but they were also “people who’d absorbed the sensibilities and attitudes of the French and the Italians and grafted them onto the materiality and energy of the Americans.” This was no dropout crowd, however, as Levy notes, but a New Aristocracy, a celebrity culture that was hardly inclusive. It was fashioned by individuals like the photographer David Bailey and model Jean Shrimpton, Vidal Sassoon and Mary Quant with their “playful, puckish, geometric” designs in hair and clothes, Terence Stamp, and, certainly, the music, to be understood as the Beatles and the Stones. It was “excitable and overheated and dismissable and convincing,” all these bells and alarms in music, art, fashion, sex, hair; it celebrated the ephemeral and was fascinated by, in Francis Wyndham’s words, “tinsel—a bright, brittle quality, the more appealing because it tarnishes so soon.” In other words, it ate its children, but not before sealing its own fate with a taste for drugs, bogus mysticism, and a bad case of blinkered attitude. Economic and cultural malaise were in wait—“race trouble, austerity, Thatcher, and the gob in the eye of punk rock as the requisite retort.” Goodbye, sunshine.
Levy’s wasn’t-it-a-groove closing chapter gets at only half the story that he has otherwise documented so well, of a scene essentially imploding—and taking a lot of lives along the way—from the start.Pub Date: July 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49857-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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SEEN & HEARD
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