Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (Primus Library of Contemporary Americana) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mailer was a poet laureate of the punch, and this classic New Journalism--style report on the '68 conventions sizes up presidential wanna-bes as if they were a batch of second-rate palookas... His descriptions alone are reason to read this still-relevant book." --Time Out New York

"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

"Our Democratic primaries are run the way they are now mainly because of the way they were run then...The almost-closing line of the book is the prediction that Mailer wishes he had made to Eugene McCarthy’s daughter: 'Dear Miss, we will be fighting for forty years.' He got that right, among many other things." --Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

"The nostalgic or the curious can seek out Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago...which 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

One "of the era's definitional books." --The Nation

"Wrong as often as he was right, Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which he wrote on assignment for Harper's, Mailer was not only perfectly attuned to the moment but prescient." --The Boston Phoenix

"Dazzling accounts of the Republican and Democratic party conventions of 1968..."--Newsday

"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." -The Washington
Post

"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

A "triumphantly vivid work of journalism." -Book World

"A political classic" -The Boston Globe

"This is Mailer's classic account of the Democratic and Republican conventions of
1968. It is an insightful portrayal of the politicians and the turbulent time." -United Press International

"A tense balance between social and literary observation which often reads like a good, old-fashioned novel in which suspense, character, plot revelations, and pungently describable action abound...The peculiar power of these books comes not from the fact that Mailer offers us better writing than that to which we are generally accustomed in politics, but, rather, from the uncanny way in which he has managed to maintain in these works the stylistic play and form of the most complex literary fiction." -The New York Review of Books (reviewed with The Armies of the Night) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Description

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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Plume (May 3, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0917657853
• ISBN-13: 978-0917657856
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #306,226 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great piece of journalistic work, April 3, 1998

By A Customer

This book is the essential companion to The Armies Of The Night--it tells about the conventions of 1968 in Miami & Chicago, & how the latter turned into a riot. Unlike Armies Of The Night, however, the writing isn't peaking, & Mailer isn't on the front. Instead, he's being a journalist (& a good one at that!)

For anybody interested in this side of American history, this book is a must. The part on Nixon being elected in Miami is the weakest part--read it quickly. The real beef lies in the second part on the Democrat convention in Chicago. You'll get shocks, laughs, everything you've come to expect from Norman Mailer.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Blasts from the Passed, September 9, 2003

By	Acute Observer (North Jersey Shore) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Miami and the Siege of Chicago (Paperback)

In August 1968 Norman Mailer attended the Republican Convention in Miami, then the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The past 35 years allows retrospection on his reports. Agnew and Nixon resigned in disgrace, and much has changed since 1968. Reagan has come and gone, elected past his prime. ("I don't know." Chapter 15.) Mailer attended the meetings to give his impression of the candidates and their supporters. Mailer's description of the hot humid air of Miami shows his literary ability and style. I swam through the waves of purple prose until I got seasick. These relentless waves carried my exhausted mind onto the sands of countless words. Mailer's quotes from Nixon's speech shows what a rhetorician Nixon was. Nixon "gave one impression and acted upon another"; but "when his language was examined, one could not call him a liar" (Chapter 14). Hence the name "Tricky Dick".

"Chicago is the great American city"; Mailer explains why. His description of a slaughterhouse again shows his rich literary style. Mailer backed Kennedy; he admired the mixture of idealism and trafficking with the overlords of corruption. Politics is property, you never give away something for nothing. If a politician is his own man, then he is ill-equipped for the game of politics (Chapter 6). Mailer says LBJ controlled the convention via Mayor Daley. It was the bitterest, most violent, disorderly, and uncontrolled in decades. Mailer analyzes the behavior of the candidates: Humphrey, McCarthy, McGovern, and others. Mailer discusses the protesters that came to Chicago, and the many organizations behind them. How many of the protesters were undercover agents? Why was the Democratic Convention a target? Was there manipulation of the protest organizations? Chapter 12 ends by saying the police targeted new photographers to avoid future evidence. Chapter 16 tells of the one-sided battle at Michigan and Balbo Avenues. Chapter 26 tells how Mailer was punched and almost arrested.

Mailer's description of the Convention listed many names who have passed from politics into the history books. Mailer puts a lot of himself into these reports; this is like a magazine article, not a newspaper story.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mailer's Genius , September 4, 2008

By	Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

We've all heard the remark used too often to describe an egocentric's prerogative to
to be self-consumed and reticent to acknowledge the rights and opinions of fellow citizens: " It's his (her)world, we're just living in it..." There are infinite variations and elaborations , all headed for the same punchline no matter the navigation the teller chooses, with hardly an improvement on the insight. The phrase, in fact, is stale and in need of retirement.

The phase had been used recently in a chat I had recently with someone regarding the re-release of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions, and the mention made me want reach for the imaginary lever for the equally imaginary trap door down which the utterer of petrified phrases would fall, the bottom chamber of which they would remain until they appreciate that cliches are no substitute for an original aside, a choice metaphor, a wild ride of associations that prove that one has been paying attention to the events about them.

Paying attention is precisely what the literary journalist in his nonfiction writings, and what Miami and the Seige of Chicago (blessedly reissued by NYR Books)shows is that for all his self-obsession, Mailer was no mere narcissistic punk considering the world his realm and its inhabitants his subjects. What gives the narrative its tension is Mailer's knack for addressing the world as he thinks it used to be what it ought to become and then confronting blunt facts that won't bend to his wishes, give in to his whims, follow a script he might have written.

Mailer is a counter puncher, to use his parlance, someone who reacts with a mind that brings details , thesis and counter thesis , call and response into spinning loops of image-saturated language. Miami/Seige , like a good amount of the nonfiction Mailer wrote during the sixties and seventies, is a richly nuanced , feverishly grandiloquent mid century reversal of Whitman's latter day desire to contain multitudes and find himself in each breath , phrase and circumstance of every American's story; Mailer, an early idealist who wanted to forge a revolution in the consciousness of the nation, as he announced in Advertisements for Myself, refuses bitterness and despair when his designs become moot and embraces ambivalence and irony instead.

This makes for a desireable place from which to wrestle with the things that irritate his senses and insult his intelligence.