Reviews for American History 2

The average rating for American History 2 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-09 00:00:00 John Handelaar “Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.” ― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History It has been a long time since I've read Mailer. I read The Executioner's Song when I was a Mormon missionary (in a Lazyboy while my companion snored in the next room) in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1993. I read Harlot's Ghost my after my sophomore year in college. Mailer is fascinating to me. At the same time he is both an irritating egoist chasing the tail of Twain, Hemingway and Fitzgerald (and never quite grabbing it). But he is also, at his best, a tiger of modern journalism. He (and Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and other New Journalists) showed that print wasn't dead. That in the age of TV, however, it needed to reinvent itself and break some of the static and almost dead boundaries. When Mailer is off, he is horrible: his writing is fat (it almost glistens with a literary lard), but, but oh when it is on. When Mailer has grabbed the Universe by the balls, there is almost nothing close to the energy of his words. It is weird to think this book was written over 50 years ago (the action happened over a few days in late October 1967; the book was published in 1968). But Mailer was my exact age when it all happened. I feel both old and young at the same time. I've been meaning to read this book for years, but now seemed right. It was an accident to read it at the same age Mailer wrote it, but it does give me a bit of perspective in his motives, his perspective, his mood. It also seems appropriate now. No other period quite seems as close to the late 60s as the last few years. I feel like something has to break, or a beast is going to be born. I hope Mailer isn't write and that we aren't in the final stages before a freakish totalitarianism emerges. Perhaps it is already too late. Deliver us from our curse - indeed.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-01 00:00:00 Adrian De Propertis I read this wonderful book back in the university semester of 1969/70, when I was managing the little library on the main floor of Leonard Hall, my residence for freshman and junior years. The preceding spring I had been awarded the University Prize for first year English. And Mr. Hanratty, the chief administrator of Leonard Hall, had duly noted that fact. Now, as it happened, I had visited the collection as a Freshman, and had seen first-hand how ill-maintained it was. Complaints must have landed on Mr. Hanratty's desk, and now he was killing two birds with one stone. The carrot on the stick which he held out to me was a mid-sized monthly allowance for book buying. A raging bibliophile on a Spartan budget, how could I refuse? I leapt at the chance. I could help out, and satisfy my book cravings too! And so, now that I had the job, I obviously had to MAINTAIN the library as well as stock it. On one of my cleaning forays, I started browsing through The Armies Of The Night. It was tremendous. Mailer, so brash and brazen in his likes and dislikes - strong drink being a big like, and pretentiousness the biggest dislike - was at heart an insecure and slightly paranoid man. He was antsy in the extreme with his literary peers. Why? Just say that word LITERARY and Mailer would recoil in dread. For him a literary person was a pretentious person. Take Robert Lowell. Like Mailer, he championed confessional literature in the 1960's - you woulda thought they'd have hit it off. Not a chance. Growing up in the wrong side of the tracks, Mailer trusted no one. Sad in a way. He just couldn't see the human side of those much better off. Armies of the Night is a desperate plea for sanity amidst the lunatic melee of the 1968 Republican convention, which would confirm Richard Nixon's desperately polished image of the new Golden Boy of the Right. Help. Yes, America would soon need all the sanity it could muster... But back to Mailer. Reading this book the year after that 1968 melee, I was riveted by his incredibly vivid prose style. He wrote confessional journalism of the highest calibre. If you want a book of reportage that is brimming with life, read this. It impressed me so much I adopted his confessional and racy style as my own. And you still see it 53 years later in reviews like this!