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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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