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THE LAST GREAT DREAM

HOW BOHEMIANS BECAME HIPPIES AND CREATED THE SIXTIES

An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history.

Grateful Dead biographer McNally examines the origins of the hippie counterculture in the post–World War II era.

The epicenter of American bohemia has always been San Francisco, where in the late 1940s “a thread of artistic discourse focused on freedom coalesced into a subculture.” Though he disavowed the beatnik label that would come in the next decade, the center of this subculture was the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, McNally holds, practiced an anarchism “in which the personal is political,” certainly a belief that would take root and then later flourish in the hippie and anti-war movements. (As McNally correctly notes, “hippie” is a media coinage: The hippies proudly called themselves “freaks.”) McNally takes his discussion to Los Angeles, never quite hip but “fertile ground for nonmainstream religious and occult thinking”; he extends it further to Greenwich Village, where a tougher-edged bohemian movement was rising. Well versed in the history of the era while not exactly breaking new ground, McNally locates some of the climacterics of the counterculture in works such as the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still, the satirical writings of Paul Krassner, and particularly Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which “simultaneously foreshadowed and helped to propagate the values of the youth culture of the 1960s.” He might have done more to make that connection more explicit, but McNally ventures a number of useful observations, including the heavy-handedness of the police as a kind of spur for rebellion and the continuing influence of the 1960s in the first years of the computer revolution, suggesting that its birth in the San Francisco Bay Area was for good reason: “The atmosphere of the Haight and LSD imparted a vision of computers that served individuals.” He sounds a hopeful chord in the thought that while the dream of the ’60s may be dead, “the dreaming continues.”

An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history.

Pub Date: May 13, 2025

ISBN: 9780306835667

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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