RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksRozzo is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and his articles there have been heavily cribbed for this book. That’s fine; if I had read the original articles there I would certainly have been left with a thirst for more research into the exuberant Sixties, and Everybody Thought We Were Crazy manages to keep up their engaging pace ... ust as engaging and rewarding to a desultory reader as to a more programmatic one. As I read this book cover to cover, I found myself flipping ahead from the early Sixties to land on a surprise appearance by the Jefferson Airplane, and as I neared the end, I treated myself to reliving an early party with Marcel Duchamp and Vincent Price, and some eyebrow-raising sexual experimentation with Hopper’s castmates from Rebel Without A Cause ... I came away from this book in awe of Hopper and Hayward, not so much for their considerable contributions to their arts but simply for their serendipity and seeming ability to have experienced firsthand everything the ‘60s had to offer. At times the book feels unreal because it resembles films like Almost Famous or Forrest Gump, whose hapless protagonists accidentally stumble into every defining event of their generation and fortuitously find themselves at parties with its brightest lights and scions. But so it was—and it is a delight to read about ... one hundred percent true, exhaustively researched, and yet more similar to a delirious romance movie than anything our sad, quotidian lives will ever contain.
Samantha Hunt
PositiveChicago Review of Books\"Her father’s unfinished novel is satisfyingly rife with spies, international intrigue, and supernatural occurrences. The idea that these may be inventions of Samantha Hunt, the elder Hunt, or \'actual\' occurrences that took place in our shared reality is similarly satisfying, deputizing the reader as a fellow detective and elevating this mystery story to a meta-level ... Interpolated within these chapters are essays...peppered liberally with references to many other texts, as though Hunt is trying to catalog every book she has ever read ... these impressionistic musings often go nowhere, but taken as a whole they make up a portrait of a dazed daughter trying to make sense of the grief of her father’s loss. At times, Hunt wanders quite far ... The Unwritten Book is a treatise on fiction disguised as a work of fiction … or a work of fiction cleverly hidden in a nonfiction book.
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Hawa Allan
PositiveChicago Review of BooksAllan chronicles not just the history of the hundreds of years of racism on this continent, but pays special attention to the extraordinary events of the past several years, while linking them to the past ... For those who may have felt disoriented by the daily barrage of surreal news during those times, Allan reminds us that such incidents have strong parallels in the recent past ... Like our narrative understanding of history itself, perhaps, Allan’s book is a series of vignettes, snapshots of significant happenings arranged in a roughly chronological order ... it is a collection of disparate viewpoints, as Allan toggles between her own lived experiences and centuries-old historical events ... The result is a sprawling, yet personal, meditation on the history of the rights of black citizens in America ... While navigating some of America’s most dramatic history, it resonates with Allan’s essential, personal truth.
