NON-FICTION
THE SOPRANOS (ON THE COUCH). Maurice Yacowar. Continuum. "The Sopranos" (along with "The Practice," "Sex And The City," "OZ" and "NYPD Blue") literally saved television -- opening up new doors as plots and characters broke from formula. And "The Sopranos" (5th season about to begin) is the leader of them all, capturing the attention of the country the way "Mash" and "Seinfeld" and "Gunsmoke" did decades before.
In Sopranos, Yacowar (a professor of film at The University of Calgary) offers us a chance to examine the phenomenon of this ground breaking HBO series, cutting to the heart of the material, appeasing our insatiable curiosity - no need - to get into Tony and Carmela’s fragile psyches; Yacowar writes:
"Tony seems trapped, smarter than his colleagues but below respectable society" (Page 172).
And later:
"Tony is clearly the central figure of the drama, its major issue is how he is regarded. ‘So,’ the show continually tests us, ‘What do you think of our Tony?’ Our response betrays our moral strength. Tony reads us by how we read him" (Page 230).
Yacowar’s perspective and perceptions are very sharp, and he does an excellent job at examining each of the episodes and analyzing how they build into one another. The book is best at dissecting the hidden themes and humor of the show and commenting on how The Sopranos culture is but an extension of our own personal little worlds: in the end, the reason why we identify with Tony is because each of together to make up little pieces of this hellish renegade. Tony Soprano’s appeal (played masterfully by James Gandolfini) lives in the fact that he’s the bad-boy we all want to be (but don’t have the guts to become).
Readers will find Yacowar’s prose captivating, as he analyzes characters and events with the keen eye of a man who knows film and how the great ones are made. With season five under way, this is a book hard-core fans shouldn’t be without: Even though it might seem hard to believe, having Sopranos available as a reference guide will make the show even more of a joy to see and savor.
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WHO THE HELL IS STEW ALBERT? (A MEMOIR). Cover art by Robert Altman. Red Hen Press.
By Hammond Guthrie
Author Larry "Ratso" Sloman was appearing on 'The Howard Stern Show' plugging his book "Steal This Dream," a biography of activist Abbie Hoffman. During the course of the interview, Sloman declared, "Well Stew Albert likes my book," to which Stern replied, "Who the hell is Stew Albert?" Answering this question in full would take me well beyond the scope of this thought provoking memoir. In retrospect, 'Stew might have continued to be an "almost"-nice, blonde haired, Jewish boy living in the basement of his mother's house in Brooklyn, but something very important happened' - we called it "The Sixties," and no one has ever been the same.
It has been suggested that "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there." Well, Stew Albert was most certainly there, and "there" for all of us who longed for social change. Change is hardly the most descriptive word for the complete dismemberment of the existing socio-political hierarchy, and Stew placed himself squarely on then radical front line in Berkeley. Those of us who were there in any capacity can well remember the smell and feel of the intriguing air surrounding the little card tables set up along Sproul Plaza. Madeline Murray (O'Hare) was there in the first support for abortion rights, Mario Savio was there warming up for the moments that would freeze the university system and much of the nation in free speech, as Stew was there representing The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), which became the prototype to anyone and everyone with the sand and heart to step up against our government's illegal war in Southeast Asia.
The trenches were not very deep in those days and suffering the consequences of freedom at the end of a billy club breathing tear gas was not an uncommon way to end the day. Stew was there for the rest of us - and didn't give in to the strain of being under the gun. The fun was only just beginning.
It was the Pranksters, the Hippies, Diggers, Yippies, Pacifists, Provocateurs, Black Panthers, Alternative Press, Beat poets, the Weather Underground, the FBI and finally, the CIA who were making and molding the scene, LSD was the sacred ritual of transit, money was a grand illusion, a pig named "Pigasus" was about to make a run on the presidency, and Chicago was just around the corner. All history now, well documented in the past, yet as I read Stew's more than reasonable accounting I became so incredibly angry I had to put the book down at least twice - remembering so clearly how I felt about the government, conscription, the war and its benefactors at a time when my own revulsion was far more than an emotional rebound.
Stew's personal rendering of socio-polical upheaval, as an anti-establishment consort standing up for the betterment of mankind with his shoulder hard pressed to the wheel brings back to life the emotional roller coaster experienced on so many levels throughout the sixties and seventies. And there is a rejoicing here as well, tempered to the page in humorous vignettes including many of the visionaries, poets and pundits of the day, all garnered from out Stew's unrelenting participation, and courageous leadership in the agit-prop bringing down the house within the rather psychedelic comedia del arté that filled our lives on a daily basis.
So who the hell is Stew Albert?" He is a gentle and honest man of his times, harboring a politically astute, intuitive mind - a collaborative man with a Marxist's edge on the past, and a Futurist's eye on the heartbeat of (r)evolutionary change.
This is a timely and important memoir. READ THIS BOOK!
© 2004 - Hammond Guthrie: All Rights Reserved: Hammond Guthrie.
Hammond Guthrie is the Editor of The 3rd Page Journal of OnGrowing Natures http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/thirdpage/index.html. He can be reached by email at: writenow@spiritone.com
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FICTION
THE LAST GOODBYE. Reed Arvin. Harper Collins. As a reviewer, I don’t believe in retracing the plot of a work of fiction line-by-line (it’s the reader’s job to arrive here on his own). Instead, I like to touch on the bigger picture of the story -- I want to cut to the meat of the book and identify how it affects and speaks to us as a collective whole. And in this regard, Arvin has made my job easy to do, for Last Goodbye is a top-notch thriller that packs action as well as intellectualism. Read on -- each of Arvin’s characters has body: written in dimensions, swollen with contradiction, lost in the dirty haze of the human condition:
"The shape of pain changes over time. In the beginning, it’s all jagged edges and serrated knives. After a while - hours, in my case - it gives way to great encircling waves, crushing you under its weight. Then the nausea begins, pushing you out to sea, farther, farther, with no chance of swimming against its angry tide. Eventually - God knows how long later, because by now time has lost its meaning - it shifts again, turning and towering, unscalable mountains of ice."
From Page 229 of the advance galley
In short, Last Goodbye tells the story of Jack Hammond, a attorney down on his luck, scraping cases from the bottom of the junk heap, a court appointed lawyer who has to take what he can get in order to get by (in this sense, the novel strips away some of the illusion about being a lawyer showing that a lot of these suits are no better off than we are). As we follow the story, we stand beside Hammond and watch him fall victim to the smell of lust mimicking love, a man drunk on the thirsty danger of shadows, a memory consumed in darkness:
"Robinson nodded. ‘You have to be willing to take chances or lose. Grayton was trying to hang on, but it’s hard to compete with the multinationals. And I knew more about hepatitis than anybody, including Ralston and his team. For all its beauty, Horizn’s drug is one generation removed from the most cutting-edge proteomics...’"
From Page 197 of the advance galley
What’s best about Arvin’s fiction is that real people with real faces populate these pages. A cut above most fictive works, Last Goodbye reveals secrets about the reader, telling us new things about our own mirrors along the way. Obviously, Arvin knows our voices and how the street talks, and he records his recollections of our collective sound in a sharp and compelling way. All the advance critical praise for Last Goodbye is dead on - in the world of mysteries and thrillers, they don’t come any better. This is Mickey Spillane good.
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OF NOTE
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DOUBT (A History). Jennifer Michael Hecht. Harper San Francisco. The questions and themes explored here are vast, almost bottomless: is there is a God? Did we evolve from another life form or from the hand of the Supreme Ruler? Should I question or just believe blindly? All this and more is the subject matter of this brilliant book by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hecht is an accomplished poet and deep thinker whose work is breaking new ground by merging the poetic with the historical: This woman on a private journey, sorting out the craziness of the world by retracing its past, magnifying its grandest successes and most deplorable failures so we all might see and understand.
One of Hecht’s finest pieces (included on her web site jennifermichaelhecht.com) is a poem called "History;" it ruminates on Eve, looking back at the first lady’s road and wondering of the things that flowed from her bleeding heart through its inhuman mind:
"Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child"
And from the slim and svelte lines of this poem, we can see the seed of Doubt take shape in the clusters of earthly space: More than anything else, this book looks back at the great doubters of the world, examining their wanderings through a maze of indecision and revelation:
"Descartes decides he will fight the evil spirit: he will force himself to believe that everything - the sky, the earth, colors, numbers, sound - is an illusion. Furthermore, ‘I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses...I shall remain obstinately attached to this idea...’ "
Page- 316
And so you have it -- this is the matter of poetry, the warm knotted sinew of thought. As Hecht notes, thousands of years and many great minds have passed before us into thirsty mirrors of invisibility (Christ, Shakespeare, Galileo, Einstein, Aristotle), these men with brave and meaningful minds bent on figuring out themselves in relation to the world outside the window. Some of them rose gloriously like new born stars, while others only plummeted into flames of obscurity -- lost in the bitter taste of doubt, chained by the inability to see beyond consciousness into the throes of perfect and thoughtless enlightenment:
"We are in age of intellectual uncertainty and we are in age of science. We are in an age of cosmopolitan secularism and an age of ardent, doubt-conscious faith. We are marked by moral ambiguity. We investigate graceful life philosophies and various transcendentalist and therapeutic meditation..."
Page-483
What is the answer? Where do we go from here? Which road do I take? Many men before us were asking these same questions, and Hecht chronicles their journey masterfully here, her prose woven with intricate detail, time line building on time line to create not only a chronicle of doubt but also a chronicle of faith and passion, of dirty truth and beauty (as Bob Dylan wrote in his 1965 epic "Gates of Eden," it’s all only a mad quest to know "what’s real and what is not").
And perhaps that’s the ultimate lesson of this book: Men have been searching since the dawn of time and they search until death in the grave frees them. And perhaps the answer and the key to our earthly purpose is as simple as that.
Highly recommended for all college and public sector libraries. Would be appropriate as a teaching text in philosophy and history courses at the undergraduate level. One of The Electric Review’s picks of the year.
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AUTUMN OF THE MOGULS: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs
and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. By Michael Wolff. Harper Collins. Michael Wolff , who writes a weekly column for New York Magazine ("This Media Life") is a journalist of great gusto and profound insight who holds nothing back. In Moguls, he gives us an insider’s break down of just what has gone wrong with the media, illuminating how the snakes took hold of the empire.
Simply, Moguls tells the story of the behind-the-scenes deal making that has rendered the media of this new America meaningless. Today, our biggest papers and magazines are not so much objective news gatherers dedicated to the dissemination of information, but instead, corporate traders looking to control the bank vaults; consequently, they dictate the things we’re allowed to see and hear. In one especially piercing passage on the rise of Martha Stewart, Wolff writes:
"Here is the first postmodern media empire. The Martha business is the ultimate guerrilla-marketing strategy: using the media to promote your media […] everything you did promoted everything else you did - you had to come up with an approach that allowed you to get paid for promoting yourself…"
What’s best about Wolff’s book and the way it’s written is that it’s about telling the truth. In one fine swipe of his pen, Wolff reminds journalists everywhere that it’s not about who you piss off, but about the reader’s right to know. This is why we do what we do -- we have an obligation to educate communities and individuals so that they can protect themselves and their personal liberties.
However, the ones who own newspapers and magazines and television stations aren’t interested in such noble endeavors. No sir. They want power and wealth and control of the market share. In reality, they’re human predators capitalizing on the public’s "need to know," manipulating the business side of journalism until nothing but the skeleton of a story remains. You see, they always leave a skeleton -- scant meat on the bone -- because they need something to sell.
Market share. Wall Street power. Advertising dollars. The monopolization of democracy. Michael Wolff had the guts to write a book about what’s really happening with the folks that sell us the news. Turn everything else off and focus your attention here.
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LEECHCRAFT: Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing. Stephen Pollington. Anglo-Saxon Books. This is the most comprehensive study of the healing arts in the Anglo-Saxon world since Henry S. Wellcome's "Anglo-Saxon Leechcraft" (published in 1912 and long since out-of-print). Pollington’s book covers everything from healing through prayer and witchcraft to the use of plants as medicine -- an interesting and absolutely thorough exploration of the way cultures have evolved, using a classic reportage style to show how communities once dealt with the suffering of the sick. In these ancient worlds, much of daily life was predicated upon prayer, and people beckoned God forth though meditation and words, requesting that He heal them through the wondrous elements of nature:
"Blessing of the plants. All-powerful , eternal god who from the world’s beginnings set up and made all things, both trees of their type, and plants with their seeds, the same ones as you have hallowed, consecrating them with your blessing..."
(Page 247--From The Lacnunga Manuscript)
What’s best about Pollington’s book is the effortless and clear way that it is written and edited: Pollington is a master lecturer who knows how to present complex and layered material in a concise and thorough manner, always careful to place data in its proper historical context. Further, Leechcraft’s format includes a detailed index which allows the reader to search for specific information without needlessly wasting time. Complimented by Lindsay Kerr’s first-rate illustrations. Highly recommended as a teaching text at the college level for all history and anthropology courses that touch on the subject matter of early English healing.
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MAYADA (DAUGHTER OF IRAQ). Jean Sassoon. Dutton. Mayada Al-Askari, a single mother with two kids, barely made enough money to survive by printing pamphlets on broken down computers. Her life in Iraq was non-descript and modest -- just one more hard-working Iraqi trying to get by. In hind-sight, this existence could never predict the suffering and tragedy that would quickly become Al-Askari’s life.
In the summer of 1999, Mayada Al-Askari was arrested by Saddam Hussein’s secret police and banished to the Baladiyat Prison, accused of circulating anti-government propaganda. The charges were obviously ludicrous -- the by-product of a dictator whose paranoia was ascending with the force of a bullet. As a prisoner, Al-Askari became just another “shadow women” -- these women who lived in the same cramped cell and endured constant torture without even knowing their “crimes”:
“The shadow women were so close that each woman was touching the woman in front and the woman in back, a train of terrified women...They quickly arrived at the end of the corridor and were herded like sheep through the narrow door. As they entered the room, a collective gasp swept through the line. The strange room was a cave. The walls were pitted and dark. Buckets lined the floors, containers filled to the top with urine. Human excrement was piled high....” (Page --163)
How would you survive such a hideous nightmare? Like Mayada and the others did: by looking backward into memories of sweeter times. By looking forward to the day when you might escape your captors and flee beyond time, unto a place where Hussein and his legacy do not exist.
We’ve heard alot about Iraq over the last 20 months -- too much in fact. However, this book switches gears. Written by Jean Sassoon (Princess: A True Story of Life Behind The Veil in Saudi Arabia) in a clear and inviting prose, it offers a first person account of the scope of the pain and suffering that for decades besieged these people. But the real core of the book is the way it poignantly depicts how women were treated under Hussein’s mighty rule. Startling and daring. You don’t need a lengthy critical summation from a reviewer. If you’re curious about what happened “over there,” buy this book.
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