Campbell writes in her preface that, when she told friends she was working on Hite, they shrugged and said they had never heard of her. Without glossing over Hite’s shortcomings, both temperamental and methodological, Campbell’s compact book makes a persuasive case for why they should have.
Though thin on interviews (a half dozen are cited in the acknowledgments) and heavy on the mea culpa of white privilege, Campbell’s book achieves transcendence in Hite’s groovy-sounding archive at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, and establishes her as a character not frivolous but extraordinary.
Campbell is at her best when invoking the countercultural ferment of New York City in the late ’60s and early ’70s ... Often too quick to dismiss criticism of Hite’s haphazard methodology ... Seems more than a little under the spell of her subject.
