The late master of gonzo journalism and dispenser of drug-addled opinion returns with this collection of his pieces for Rolling Stone magazine.
There was a time when Rolling Stone was hip, and Thompson (Kingdom of Fear, 2003, etc.), made it more so, even as he turned the world of straight journalism on its head. In 1970, he wrote his first piece for the magazine, a twisted manifesto/report on his campaign for a new kind of mayor in Aspen, Colo.: “Our program, basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley…No more land rapes, no more busts for ‘flute-playing' or ‘blocking the sidewalk’….zone the greedheads out of existence.” (Thompson records that he lost by only six votes.) He followed with a closely reported, quietly angry piece on the murder-by-cop of Los Angeles activist and fellow reporter Ruben Salazar: “When he went to cover the rally that August afternoon, he was still a ‘Mexican-American journalist.’ But by the time his body was carried out of the Silver Dollar, he was a stone Chicano martyr.” After that piece, the going quickly turned weird as Thompson embarked upon his “Fear and Loathing” series of misadventures, the best (and best-known) of them being the immortal, howlingly funny Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, followed by a superbly bizarre take on the Super Bowl and then, in 1992, a similarly wild piece recounting a supposed romp with Clarence Thomas in the outback of Nevada: “What the hell? I thought. It’s only rock & roll. And he was, after all, a Judge of some kind…Or maybe not. For all I knew he was a criminal pimp with no fingerprints, or a wealthy black shepherd from Spain.” Included here are numerous lesser-known pieces as well, among them an elegant obituary for Timothy Leary, one of the “pure warriors who saw the great light and leapt for it.” Much of this work is available in earlier collections such as The Great Shark Hunt, but that doesn’t make this any less essential—a fine gathering by one of the best writers of our time.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6595-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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