Good, provocative stuff: thinking, decent, inclusive.
A rumination on experience and the spirit of political militancy from longtime activist and media gadfly Gitlin (Journalism & Sociology/Columbia Univ.; Media Unlimited, 2002, etc.).
So, he asks the recipient of these well-framed reflections, you would like “to do something useful against the crimes and sins, the starvation and massacre, torture and terror, ecological damage, disease, bigotry, the suppression of castes (women and racial groups among them), a whole multitude of oppressions”? Good, says Gitlin: any time is a good time to change the world, and don't forget to smile, to sing, to bring the garlic, and to invite the prankster of possibilities. Don't forget strategy and duty (respectful to all, obsequious to none), or love, that brittle substance full of philosophical and psychological thickets, or adventure. These are not simply words for Gitlin, but life forces, and he trundles out all manner of experience with a vibrant handful of anti-establishment movements to illustrate the various themes he is getting at: the novelty of each historical situation; the critical balance of spontaneity and tactic; the need to be suspicious of power and yet recognize its ability to do good, to fight while realizing that you can't always get what you want. Act as a citizen demanding social equality while staging “farce, pranks, surrealism on stilts,” he advises. “Do good by having fun. Get away with it.” Gitlin points out the potholes in the road—the market for bravado, the backfires of rage, the inevitable face plants—as he suggests ways to go about assuming our responsibility for political action in a time of “gluttony, glibness, mediocrity, and evasion,” with a wary eye on the lookout for perverse consequences. If you don't agree with what he happens to be saying at the moment, well and good: “Only in autocracy is doubt a breach of decorum.” None of this is prescriptive, but inspiring and darkly ironic. Be reasonable, Gitlin urges: ask the impossible.
Good, provocative stuff: thinking, decent, inclusive.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-465-02738-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
IN THE NEWS
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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