Miami and the Siege of Chicago

De: Norman Mailer

Narrado por: Arthur Morey

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.

©1968 Norman Mailer (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Introduction © 2008 by Frank Rich.

Mailer's hiliarious riff on American politics

This is 340 pages of brilliant commentary on the state of American politics in 1968. Mailer is at the top of his game - over the top - in describing the Republican and Democratic conventions. Funny, insightful, and prescient.

1968 Was A Crazy Political Year

"Men whose lives are built on the ego can die of any painful disease but one--they cannot endure the dissolution of their own ego, for then nothing is left with which to face emotion, nothing but the urge to grovel at the enemy's feet."
- Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

It is closing in on the 2020 primaries and all to soon we will be watching at least ONE party conventions of 2020. Makes me look back on some crazy times in American politics. Perhaps, the only years within recent memory to rival 2016 and 2000 would be 1968. It was the middle of the Vietnam war, MLK was assassinated, Johnson had dropped out and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. American was bat$hit. And nobody captures bat$hit better than Norman Mailer (well, maybe Hunter S. Thompson).

I've recently come back to Mailer after an intermission of 20 years. He is a writer you need to take in small doses, but as usually happens, I read over 1000 pages of Mailer and discover like alcohol he might just be no good for me, but maybe just one last book. I do tend to prefer his nonfiction writing to his fiction, so this book was a delight. One can still enjoy something that isn't healthy, right?