Friday, January 24, 2025

1974: a personal history by Francine Prose

href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198530961-1974" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">1974: A Personal History1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a memoir of the seventies centered around the author's brief relationship with Anthony Russo, the co-conspirator with Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers' revelations gleaned during their employment with the RAND Corporation. The topics are dear to me as one who participated in this era, has written about it, and is married to a Vietnam Veteran anti-war activist, and the story is prescient today as we plan our own 2025 actions. I appreciated Prose's honest appraisals of her youthful self ("I tell myself that not everyone is born with a conscience, that our moral sense can develop at any age. We can change. We can change our minds. Sometimes, when people have asked what my novels are "about," I've said, for want of a better answer, or any answer at all, that some of them are "about " how a person develops a moral conscience, or not. Maybe the subject interests me because I feel that my own conscience developed a little late"), as well as her vivid descriptions of San Francisco landmarks and events, the cultural earmarks and topics of the era. She is a talented writer and skillfully structures her memoir.

Two more quotations:

"During a CBS News interview...Ellsberg said that it would hurt the American people to learn "that the men who they gave so much respect and trust, as well as power, regarded them as contemptuously as they regarded our Vietnamese allies...We are the government. The lesson is that the people of this country can't afford to let the president run the country by himself."

"There's a grim fun in listening to Johnson's recorded telephone conversations and Nixon's Oval Office taps. The crudeness and vulgarity, the vindictive nastiness, the childish lack of impulse control shown by the leaders of our country--it's comical and terrifying to realize that these guys were in charge."

View all my reviews

No comments :