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A review by gregbrown
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 by Norman Mailer
2.0
Mailer may be one of the most frustrating writers I've ever read.
He specializes in excess—never using one clause when three, five, ten would do. It's a blizzard of details and invocations that aims for transcendence, in the sense of someone firing an assault rifle straight up in the air. And the poorly-edited feeling only compounds when, amidst the mess, there's a few pages of clear insight that eggs you on to keep reading the rest.
The book itself is somewhat interesting as a contemporaneous account of the conventions, but just read Rick Perlstein instead.
He specializes in excess—never using one clause when three, five, ten would do. It's a blizzard of details and invocations that aims for transcendence, in the sense of someone firing an assault rifle straight up in the air. And the poorly-edited feeling only compounds when, amidst the mess, there's a few pages of clear insight that eggs you on to keep reading the rest.
The book itself is somewhat interesting as a contemporaneous account of the conventions, but just read Rick Perlstein instead.