An astute look at the mighty vortex of fame, which this author believes will only get more powerful.
NPR commentator Halpern (Braving Home, 2003) investigates the psychological and societal forces behind America’s growing addiction to celebrity.
Weaving personal stories about eager wannabes willing to pay any price—from parting with spouses to quitting jobs to humiliating themselves on reality TV—with disturbing statistics from university psychological studies (including his own “fame survey”), the author presents an America more interested in money, beauty and prestige than integrity, intellect and honor. Halpern’s search for the motives for this preoccupation takes him across the country; he visits schools, modeling agencies and even a Los Angeles apartment complex known for its large number of aspiring child stars to find out why Americans have become so obsessed with their 15 minutes. He also interviews a host of concerned scholars and “industry insiders” (i.e., agents and managers). Halpern contends that technology, which can now disseminate countless images and stories in nanoseconds, is partly to blame, as is the abundance of celebrity-infused pop-culture magazines and TV shows. Moving into the psychological realm, he explains the “Belongingness Theory,” which posits that over time, evolution has created an internal mechanism that makes us crave social acceptance. This mechanism prompts us to feel stressed when we are isolated and pleased when we interact with others. The last chapter is the most touching, as the author visits “The Fund,” a cloistered enclave at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains for actors, soundmen, producers and writers who have grown too old or infirm to take care of themselves. There, Halpern finds something the current generation lacks: actual respect for a craft, a dream that extends beyond mere spotlight and cross-promotion.
An astute look at the mighty vortex of fame, which this author believes will only get more powerful.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-45369-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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