Customer Reviews

Going to the Dogs (Perennial Mystery Library)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is another history concerning the SDS, or the Students for a Democratic Society. Miller admits in the introduction that he was a member of SDS and is sympathetic to what they did or tried to do. Not only is this book shorter than Kirkpatrick Sale's excellent history of SDS, but its focus is different as well. Where Sale focuses on the group as a whole, Miller provides more of an intellectual history of SDS. Miller provides exacting detail on the early period of SDS, especially the convention that produced the Port Huron Statement. For a much more thorough and detailed history of the SDS, please refer to Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS.

I still really enjoyed reading Miller's book. I like books that discuss intellectual development, and this one certainly accomplishes that. There is even an entire chapter devoted to C. Wright Mills, the radical sociologist that so many in the New Left idolized. Mills's idea of publics and his concerns about technology spoke directly to the alienation many young leftists felt. Miller points out that both Mills and the New Left shared a crucial weakness; both articulated problems without posing any effective solutions. This is most apparent in the idea of participatory democracy, the cornerstone of Port Huron. This idea, much touted by SDS members for most of its history, was never adequately defined in the document. Miller shows that many of the SDS projects, such as ERAP, were attempts to put participatory democracy into practice. The end result was failure because a concept such as this would probably only work on an extremely small level. As more people are brought into the mix, participation becomes problematic because so many different ideas are brought forth. Process and decisions become arthritic and meetings drag on for hours without results.

Miller seems to bog down considerably when he moves into the second half of his work. He provides four accounts of four separate members of SDS, one of whom is of course Tom Hayden. The problem with this technique is that none of these members had much to do with SDS after 1965. The later struggles of SDS are subsumed under these four accounts. Therefore, not nearly enough detail is given to the PL-SDS and Weather split in 1969. For description of the old guard of SDS, Miller is an excellent source. Just don't expect to find out much about late 1960's SDS.

While Miller is notably weak in is treatment -- and I would say understanding -- of the impact of the counter-culture and the civil rights movements, this is probably the most authoritative account to SDS, the student dimension of the anti-war movement, and the intellectual history of the New Left. His treatment is highly critical but born of a sympathetic hopes. He vastly overestimates the impact of the 1960s on American politics, and misses out of the opportunities to demostrate the lasting impact which developed through the "new social movements" of the 1970s and the present.

I just happened on the reviews of this book and noticed that someone had given it less than 5 stars, which seemed to me fundamentally unjust. Democracy is in the Streets is a terrific book, and although it has been at least 10 years since I read it through--pretty much in one sitting--it has never been off my shelves and is often on my mind. Miller is a wonderful writer and a brilliant intellectual historian. I like (and use) Kirk Sale's history as well, but Miller is much more accessible and almost as exhaustive (but a lot less exhausting). Anyone interested in the history of the New Left in the US needs to read this book.

In Dan Kavanagh's (aka Julian Barnes) third mystery with Duffy as the ex-cop bisexual British protagonist, the crime is committed at Braunscomb Hall, the country estate of Vic Crowther, a newly rich man with a checkered history, married to Belinda Blessing, who had a successful career in another life exposing not one but both her mammary blessings to an adoring male public (a "topless bird"). Crowther has graciously thrown open his home to a motley crew: Angela, whose biological clock is running away, is engaged to Henry, an ace billiard player who is tied tightly to his mum's apron strings, a woman who probably has lived to be so old only because she is so nasty. When she meets Duffy, she calls him a "shirt-lifter" because of his sexual persuasion. Then there is Jimmy, who pines for Angela, and wanders in and out of the novel wearing a frogman wet suit. Sally and Damian make an interesting couple. They both like their coke but not out of a bottle and engage in one of the funniest, most lascivious escapades with billiard balls in the entire novel-- or in any novel for that matter. Mrs. Colin, a native of the Philippines, is the servant who discovers the body. Taffy is an ex-con into weightlifting and psychobabble. The list goes on. It's a shame that either Robert Altman or John Schlesinger did not make this sophisticated brittle comedy into a fine movie.

With a collection of potty-- I had to look the word up-- characters, the cynical Duffy has his work cut out for him. Some of his observations: "In the real world you married not for love but because someone else would have you." He wonders if there are "marriage enforcers" in the Yellow Pages. He is sometimes tempted by what he calls "upward sexual mobility." He opines that ex-cons, who would not steal dandruff from your collar are jumpy if "crept up on." He describes Angela as a "good-looking woman in need of a ten-thousand-mile service." It is deliciously ironic that Duffy likes to read highbrow restaurant reviews in a country famous for some of the worst cuisine ever tasted, Elizabeth David to the contrary not withstanding. He also gives brilliant interior monologues: example, how what we don't like cannot be simply something we hate; it is now a phobia. I was happy to see Duffy comment that "'all families go way back. I have just as many ancestors as the next man,'" something that Karl Marx said as well.

Stylish, witty, ribald and aptly named, GOING TO THE DOGS will tickle your funny bone.