Heartland by Mort Sahl
|
Book Summary Author: Mort Sahl Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 1977-01-09 ISBN: 0151398208 Number of pages: 158 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P |
| New | New Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $49.99 | ||
| Used | Used Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $0.02 | ||
| Collectible | Collectible Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $10.00 |
Your purchase is protected by the A-to-z Safe Buying Guarantee. Amazon.com automatically transfers your payment to the merchant so you'll never need to pay a merchant directly. Amazon.com A-to-z Safe Buying Guarantee covers both the delivery of your item and its condition upon receipt.
Book Reviews of the Heartland
Customer Review: Mort Sahl, post-JFK
Summary: 3 Stars
First, this is not a written book; it's a transcribed one. Lotsa stream-of-consciousness & digressions that left me with the impression that Mr. Sahl was doing a night club routine into a tape recorder, & then somebody transcribed it. Who knows, maybe most books are written this way, but it's real obvious here.
Sahl was one of the first post-WWII political humorists, who cut his teeth on the beat-jazz subculture of 1950s San Francisco. Although by the late 70s, when he had a short-lived radio show on WRC in WDC (some of his best stuff was segue exchanges with Willard Scott), he seemed to have morphed into a right-of-center curmudgeon, he was originally an undogmatic radical who admired JFK, Castro, Albanian premier Enver Hoxha, & Ronald Reagan; as old-time Chicago radio host Jack Eigen called him, a professional nonconformist.
There is little here that was not recycled on his radio show. (He's actually hosted countless radio & TV shows in many cities.) Seven or eight years after the fact, there is little doubt that he holds New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in high regard, & if only 1/10th of what Sahl writes about being blacklisted for his association with Garrison is true, it's enough to make you swear off network TV forever. As Sahl writes, "Television is never more false than when it tries to be honest."
Lotsa inside info. on the entertainment industry & enough politics to shake the faith of the Gen-Xers that believe there's always been MTV & that American history began with Ronald Reagan. Despite the 30 years since since this book was published, when you read that a "social democratic President would have to bomb China to prove he's not a communist," there's an eerie prescience that might make you wonder whether those pop-op words "liberal" & "conservative" aren't being grossly misappropriated.