Essential for students of journalism, particularly local and long-form, and a pleasure for anyone who values lively prose.
A much-needed, welcome gathering of work by the radical journalist and crusading editor.
A cross between Christopher Hitchens and Joseph Mitchell, with some of the personal habits of Hunter Thompson, Hinckle (1938-2016) cut a piratical figure around downtown San Francisco, eyepatch and all, never far from a shot and a pint. For all his dissolute ways, he was whip-smart, caught between embracing his Jesuitical education and rejecting its premises. The title of this anthology of writings begins on a Catholic note—the “pagan babies” in question are Chinese, the church, “authority without terror,” committed to baptizing them lest they go unsaved—that continues throughout, if with an unorthodox body of working-class saints to celebrate. One of the author’s heroes, for instance, is the deep-red labor activist Harry Bridges, who integrated the Bay Area’s maritime unions by going, “with the wisdom of the radical,” to black churches and asking workers not to cross picket lines, promising that blacks would be enrolled on the waterfront if they resisted the temptation to scab. Later, as editor of the muckraking leftist monthly Ramparts—well, sort of monthly, since it printed when the stars in Hinckle’s mind were in alignment—he spearheaded a stunningly comprehensive investigation of racial inequality in Oakland, where, if you are in the roughly half of the population below the poverty line, you “go to jail when you are told, only pass Go when you receive permission.” The volume editors, one a longtime Hinckle associate, capably work their way through an embarrassment of riches, giving plenty of room to his sketches of memorable characters such as Monty the Duck, Hydro Willy, and the Rev. Willis Egan (“he bought the drinks, which turned out to be a good thing as he drank like a Jesuit fish”) and his incisive studies of moments like the killing of Harvey Milk and the near-simultaneous—and, in his mind, connected—tragedy of Jonestown.
Essential for students of journalism, particularly local and long-form, and a pleasure for anyone who values lively prose.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59714-416-2
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Heyday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
PERSPECTIVES
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 Yorkerstaff 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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