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1968. The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson, facing a challenge in his own Democratic Party from the maverick antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced that he would not seek a second term. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in inner cities throughout America. Bobby Kennedy was killed after winning the California primary in June. In August, Republicans met in Miami, picking the little-loved Richard Nixon as their candidate, while in September, Democrats in Chicago backed the ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey. TVs across the country showed antiwar protesters filling the streets of Chicago and the police running amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike.
In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer, America's most protean and provocative writer, brings a novelist's eye to bear on the events of 1968, a decisive year in modern American politics, from which today's bitterly divided country arose.
Review:
Four years ago, presidential historian Michael Beschloss wrote an Expert's Picks for these pages, in which he chose the most revealing books about the American election process. Among his picks was Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." Now reissued in time for the 40th anniversary of those groundbreaking (in every sense of the word in the case of Chicago) conventions, Mailer's book is back,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) full of his unconventional observations about the quadrennial gatherings in 1968 and their surrounding political culture. Mailer added to the new brand of journalism that was taking hold throughout the country and brought his original and iconoclastic views to a public just beginning to comprehend a new politics. Beschloss wrote: "Mailer's political judgment is at best eccentric ... but his political reportage can be brilliant. Here the novelist scrutinizes the 1968 conventions that nominated Richard Nixon in Jackie Gleason's Miami Beach and Hubert Humphrey in the first Mayor Daley's Chicago, amid bloody confrontations between police and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. ... For historians who wish for the presence of a world-class literary witness at crucial moments in history, Mailer in Miami and Chicago was heaven-sent." For this new edition, New York Times columnist Frank Rich sets the scene in an introduction that starts with a profile of Mailer, then a 45-year-old on assignment for Harper's magazine, "an aging rebel looking for a new cause." Rich lauds Mailer for his "ability to make the present real" and for being "remarkably prescient about the future." For anyone with an ear for history and an eye for the political scene, it will be hard to skim a book like this, and you risk missing the nuggets embedded in the anecdotes and stories. Mailer wrote third-person, eyewitness accounts of the events, describing the cities themselves, the usual '60s suspects (Nixon, Agnew, Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan on one side and Humphrey, Muskie and Eugene McCarthy on the other), and the political turmoil in the wake of the turbulent months leading up to the conventions (growing protests about the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and the announcement, not six months earlier, by President Lyndon Johnson that he would not run again). Here's Mailer in his own words: On Richard Nixon: "While he was never in trouble with the questions, growing surer and surer of himself as he went on, the tension still persisted between his actual presence as a man not altogether alien to the abyss of a real problem, and the political practitioner of his youth, that snake-oil salesman who was never back of any idea he sold, but always off to the side where he might observe its effect on the sucker." On Ronald Reagan: "As Reagan made his plea for unity, he spoke with a mildness, a lack of charisma, even a simplicity, which was reminiscent of a good middle-aged stock actor's simplicity — well, you know, fellows, the man I'm playing is an intellectual, and of course I have the kind of mind which even gets confused by a finesse in bridge. ... Reagan had long ago incorporated the confidence of an actor who knows he is popular with interviewers. ... He had a public manner which was so natural that his discrepancies appeared only slightly surrealistic: at the age of fifty-seven, he had the presence of a man of thirty, the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself." On Humphrey: "It was a curious convention, all but settled before it began, except for the bile-bubbling fear of the nominee that he would lose; it was locked, yet extraordinarily unsettled. ..." On Muskie: "He was a pleasant fellow with a craggy face, a craggy smile on top of a big and modest jaw, and he had a gift for putting together phrases which would have stood him well if he had been stacking boxes of breakfast food on a grocery shelf." On the protesters in Chicago: "The air of Lincoln Park came into the nose with that tender concern which air seemed always ready to offer when danger announced its presence. The reporter took an unhappy look around. Were these odd unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wished to enter battle?" All of these observations from a reporter who, as he described himself, "stood in the center of the American Scene." Eveyln Small is a book reviewer for The Washington Post Book World. Reviewed by Evelyn Smalls, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"Don't skim...if you dash your way through Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer's masterful account of the upheaval that occurred 40 years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in those two cities, there to select their presidential nominees, you'll miss a lot. First published in 1968, and reissued earlier this month by New York Review Books, Mailer's report glows with descriptions of the people and the places whose permanent identities were forged in the hot furnace of that tragic, fateful year. To understand 1968, you must read Mailer." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"[Miami and the Siege of Chicago] often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound....Mailer has created a fresh entente between the personal mode and the public record....Simply, he has enlarged the territories of language, something the very best writers have always done for us." Jack Richardson, The New York Review of Books
Review:
"Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago...analyzed events inside and beyond the convention hall with its author's characteristic, and in this case perfectly appropriate, blend of intellectual grandiosity and journalistic acumen." A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Review:
"One of the era's definitional books." The Nation
Review:
"Dazzling accounts of the Republican and Democratic party conventions of 1968." Newsday
Review:
"This is an excellent account of the conventions...Mailer sets the scene sensually like Dickens...his vignettes have imperial authority." The New York Times Book Review
Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955 he co-founded The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; The Gospel According to the Son; and The Castle in the Forest.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York Review Books Classics)
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Reviews:
"Review"
by Chicago Tribune,
"Don't skim...if you dash your way through Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer's masterful account of the upheaval that occurred 40 years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in those two cities, there to select their presidential nominees, you'll miss a lot. First published in 1968, and reissued earlier this month by New York Review Books, Mailer's report glows with descriptions of the people and the places whose permanent identities were forged in the hot furnace of that tragic, fateful year. To understand 1968, you must read Mailer."
"Review"
by Jack Richardson, The New York Review of Books,
"[Miami and the Siege of Chicago] often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound....Mailer has created a fresh entente between the personal mode and the public record....Simply, he has enlarged the territories of language, something the very best writers have always done for us."
"Review"
by A.O. Scott, The New York Times,
"Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago...analyzed events inside and beyond the convention hall with its author's characteristic, and in this case perfectly appropriate, blend of intellectual grandiosity and journalistic acumen."
"Review"
by The Nation,
"One of the era's definitional books."
"Review"
by Newsday,
"Dazzling accounts of the Republican and Democratic party conventions of 1968."
"Review"
by The New York Times Book Review,
"This is an excellent account of the conventions...Mailer sets the scene sensually like Dickens...his vignettes have imperial authority."
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