An approachable, comprehensive introduction to British culture outside the mainstream, but it may be a bit too general and...
The histories of the United Kingdom’s vibrant underground and alternative cultures are the focus of this essay collection, edited by Gillieron (Plays for Today by Women, 2013) and Robson (Celluloid Ceiling, 2014).
This book’s 15 chapters are each written by a different author, and they cover a broad range of topics as they relate to the U.K. counterculture, including gaming, feminism, environmentalism, online communities, and film. Many essays trace the roots of a particular subculture from the post–World War II years to the present, while others look further back to the earliest decades of the 20th century. A clear passion consistently comes across throughout the collection, with each section looking at the many possible meanings of the term “counterculture.” Their parallels to cultural movements in America, and their divergences from them, will be striking to stateside readers. Still, some chapters stand out more than others. The sections on literature and small-press magazines, black and minority ethnic arts, and the stand-up comedy scene nimbly manage to bring readers up to speed on decades of growth and change while also constructing engaging arguments about their relations to the mainstream. On the other hand, the essays on visual art and music suffer from their attempts to cover too much ground in a limited space. Some major topics, such as the Young British Artists visual art movement and punk rock, get relatively short shrift here, even though each could easily warrant a book-length study of its own. On the whole, the essays benefit from their refusal to get bogged down by obtuse jargon. However, they also draw liberally from the authors’ first-person experiences, which can undermine the credibility of academic writing. But although this rhetorical style isn’t always successful, the examinations of LGBT culture and disability-related arts and activism use it effectively.
An approachable, comprehensive introduction to British culture outside the mainstream, but it may be a bit too general and conversational for academic researchers and scholars.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9566329-6-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Aurora Metro Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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