Volume 15, Number 9 · November 19, 1970
Youth Wants to Know
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago
by Todd Gitlin, by Nancy Hollander
Harper & Row, 435 pp., $10.00
Revolutionary Notes
by Julius Lester
Grove, 203 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Search for the New Land
by Julius Lester
Dial, 195 pp., $4.95
Going All the Way
by Dan Wakefield
Delacorte, 307 pp., $6.95
Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey
by Jay Neugeboren
Dutton, 221 pp., $5.95
Left at the Post
by Nicholas von Hoffman
Quadrangle, 218 pp., $5.95
Moving Through Here
by Don McNeill
Knopf, 235 pp., $5.95
All the books in this remarkable collection, except for Mr. Wakefield's novel, are works of reportage; and all of them are perceptive and sophisticated in their understanding of how life goes on in America today. Each is well worth reading; together they complement and reinforce one another. Two of them, Mr. Lester's Search for the New Land and Mr. McNeill's Moving Through Here, are incomparably fine. The quality of Mr. McNeill's work is almost entirely a reflection of the human qualities of its author, whose accidental death by drowning, at the age of twenty-three, just at the moment when his tough gentleness was most needed by the kinds of young people he understood best, and might have defended, suggests that God is petty and meanspirited as well as cruel—but this, presumably, has always been evident to those who believe in Him and may even be what most attracts them. Certainly, little evidence of divine mercy appears in the composite picture of America that these books present.
Review, 5814 words
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