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5.0 out of 5 stars
DAYS OF THE BITTER END---A PROPHECY..., September 5, 2007
This review is from: The Days of the Bitter End (Hardcover)
I found myself reading the pages of this book in reverent awe.
This was how it all began....this was the launch. Yes, the Beat Generation had been around since The Bomb. It was all over they said....live it up while you can.
But then something happened. It started in the Greenwich Village of the Early Sixties...in the Mad Abandon so charcteristic of the cafes and the scene on Bleecker Street.
Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Barbra Streisand, Bill Cosby, Lennie Bruce...started doing their thing...with gusto. An within ten years they had stood this Nation on its ear. It was more than music....it was a way of life. Shove America's sins in its nose....pull down the hypocritical suburbanites and their smug satisfaction....redesign America....say what you feel...do what you feel....DON'T DO what you DON'T feel....
It was a chilling vision for the older generation....yet those who preached it and sang it became the idols of my generation....
Jack Engelhard, the tough-minded journalist, veteran of the police and city hall beats, yet also a wandering immigrant soul so grateful for a home where you could raise your voice on the streets, was there. He saw it...He lived it...and in DAYS THE BITTER END he tells it.
Whether your soul cries out to relive from whence we came, or whether you want a first hand account of how it REALLY WAS back then...this book is for you.
Excitement....drama..alienation...ambition...the music, the libertine sex....most people cannot believe there was such a time and a place...A riveting novel of love and lust..of soaring joy and bitter despair...of Camelot awash and broken to pieces dream by dream in the two inch deep Perdenales River...oh yes of bitter downward change...from JFK to LBJ....like it or lump it....this is the way it was.
This book is a precious literary and historical resource...a stunning and disturbing hands on account of a nation bursting into flames...driven by the zeal of youth.
For me, a serious student and writer of the years that followed, this book was a spiritual experience.
John W. CassellA
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Bitter Times... Flavored With the Best Espresso... An Ending Better than Bogart and Bergman., September 1, 2008
This review is from: The Days of the Bitter End (Hardcover)
Being engrossed in a novel is all I ask, i.e., give me the opposite of a yawn. I know I will count no yawns when reading anything by Jack Engelhard. THE DAYS OF THE BITTER END, presently working toward a movie presentation, was as engrossing as other novels I've read by Engelhard. Yet, DAYS had something more. I'm not sure I'll be able to isolate that "more."
What continued catching my attention while reading DAYS was the STRUCTURE of this novel of the 60's, a story seen through the unique perspective of a Jewish immigrant, Ben Jaffa, though the surface format of the story follows the high-talent-for-imitation and depressed-mental-state of stand-up-comic, Cliff Harris, John F. Kennedy's doppelganger.
As is true for all Engelhard's composition, every word in DAYS paused slightly in pensive punch, as it flowed with neighboring words in a smooth-jazz literary-rhythm. That is the skill which usually impresses me first when I read one of Jack's books.
But DAYS had that something more, a subtle structure alternating between two main characters and among several subsidiary characters, all of whom danced through pages in variously timed steps. Usually the chapters featured one of these characters, often opening with the character's name and perspective. But, as the book progressed, Cliff and Ben gradually took over the main show... with Cliff the front stage man of tortured soul, and Ben the backstage guy, sotto voce, living a LIFE.
Cliff carried the opening. Ben carried the mundane reality (which is the true treasure of life), ultimately exposing the ethics and the end.
An intriguingly structured, enthralling treatise on the youth driven 60's, the perspective of that time coming through DAYS is not at all what you would expect. It is what you would hope for, though. Very much that.
I would recommend as high as I can reach that you read this novel in its original state, then go see the movie when it debuts, with hopes that the movie will translate the art of the book.
Moving now into some of the grit in the story, as said above, I again relished this author's applied writing rhythm, which in this case felt like a "beat" (excuse the pun, but it did feel that way and drew me right in without skipping one).
Again, I appreciated Engelhard's interesting takes on cultural conditions and especially the melancholic sense of the passing of this time even during the experience of its present... (You may have to read DAYS to understand what I mean by that.)
Swirling the subplots from the base of Cliff's reaction to the announcement of Kennedy's assassination was an exquisite literary maneuver which fully exposed the ironic flips and conflicts in Harris's attitude just prior to, then at and after the announcement. A great technique used effectively, that of opening with the pervasive mood at Cliff's matinee performance at the time of announcement, then backtracking.
Also admired how the author brought in the graduated levels of dawning public awareness about Kennedy's death.
The book's opening line is a syntax masterpiece:
>> Cliff Harris, America's most popular comedic performer, was on stage and deep into his frolicsome Kennedy impersonation when word arrived upon the whisper of ravens that Kennedy had been shot. <<
As usual, I found a plethora of perceptive or pithy passages well worth quoting, but I'll allow you the pleasure of meeting those as you read.
Character depth was created with deft precision, yet the effect was sensitive and smooth rather than edgy or sparse. The chapters easily slide into the various head-spaces of each character's point-of-view, the effect of which exposed a fascinating situation of the connections between Cliff, Ben, Richie, and Louise. The circumstances were so realistic that I wondered if the author was a basis for Ben, and a personal friend of Harris. Louise's attitude toward her youthful vigor was delightfully presented and believable, along with Richie's guitar smashing reaction to it. The contrasting personalities of Ben and Richie were well done, and the "bleed through" was fascinating, of what appeared to be snippets of the author's personal history.
At this point, I'm going to confess that I experienced an unusual reading-process-compulsion with this novel, which occurred when I was a quarter of the way into the text. I'll recount that process in a comment under this review, since those details do not directly pertain to a review of this novel, yet may be of interest to some readers. Also, that lengthy comment will give away whiffs of flavor of the novel's ending.
Here's another confession while I'm at it:
I've never been comfortable with, or attracted to relive, those times of the 60's, the philosophies and how they played out. It was Engelhard's perspective which allowed me to become a full resident in DAYS, his perspective brought forth through Ben as an immigrant who didn't forget where he came from and what he had here, his being gently appreciative of what so many were desecrating then.
Being brought up by a woman like my mother (as described in Coal & Coca-Cola, an Amazon Short), and having the family and cultural background I did, I wasn't prey to the rage against America which surfaced during the 60's and 70's.
This novel, though, allowed me to live in Greenwich Village, within the soiled and unsoiled foundations of the counterculture movement.
I should mention that John W. Cassell's novels of the counterculture movement (Odyssey:1970 featured among them) provide excellent parallels to DAYS, in literary quality and reader involvement, for different reasons, and in different styles (see my reviews).
In conclusion, I'll note that I align with Ben Jaffa's attitude toward these times, and I'm thankful that I lived through them where and how I did, at a distance from the rage. From this novel, though, I've broadened my sense of what occurred from the microcosm of Greenwich Village. I had no idea! Now I do.
Signing off with hat off to a fascinating historic re-enactment, with no yawns anywhere in plot or out of it!
Linda Shelnutt
Author of several KINDLE books and Amazon Shorts
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