The Hell's Angels are the outlaw motorcycle cult of Southern California who have acquired an image of almost mythical proportions. Mr. Thompson, journalist, lived, rode, and even fought with them for a period of over a year. What he has come up with is an interesting sociological comment, particularly on the peculiar propaganda powers of the press. Two highly publicized incidents—the supposed gang rape of two fourteen and fifteen year old girls during a beach orgy, and the rumble take-over of a small town for a very lost weekend, brought the Angels to a pinnacle of national nation-wide attention and public protest. As Mr. Thompson points out in his dissection of fact vs. fiction, the reports were misleading or as he puts it "incredible swill." And he launches a beautiful attack on the "New York Press Establishment" i.e., Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. The phenomenal aspect of this press was that the Angels started believing the image. They trekked to the movies to see themselves portrayed on film by Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin in The Wild Ones. They got dirtier, tougher, meaner and for a while even had a public relations man to promote their madness into some sizable cash. What Mr. Thompson tries to say is that the Angels, while not angels, are not as bad as believed. They are "mutants," a bit more misfit but actually not too dissimilar from the local fraternity on rampage. Regardless, they have the sort of repellent fascination that may find a large readership.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1966
ISBN: 067960331X
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1966
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
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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