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ethic; through the affluence of later industrial, corporate culture; to the
postindustrial economy, which provides greater opportunity for envi–
ronmental beneficence and human liberation. Kimball cites the admitted
analogy between Reich's dialectical history and his biographical devel–
opment-from the virginity of his striving youth and hard-working mid–
dle age to heterosexual abundance in his forties and the subsequent
freedom of polymorphous sensuality and the homosexual lifestyle.
One illuminating sidelight takes the form of a comedy of manners, by
two cultural idols of the sixties, Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary.
Both shared a period of exile in Algeria. Kimball notes the great praise of
contemporaneous critics for the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, and quotes
Cleaver's prose at length in all its raving. Cleaver, the leader of the Black
Panthers and the candidate for president of the Peace and freedom party,
was the host for Dr. Leary, the onetime Harvard professor of psychology
who gained fame for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Kimball records
Leary's initial enthusiasm: "The Panthers are the hope of the world.
Socialism works here.... Eldridge is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned on
too!" However, later Leary complains that the Panthers have "kidnapped
us at gunpoint, held us in 'jail' in various apartments around town, issued
press releases announcing our 'arrest' for lack of discipline, and searched
our apartment vainly for documents proving we were CIA operatives. "
The conjunction of two different worlds in the Leary-Cleaver exile is
characteristic of other radical happenings that punctuated the 1960s.
Kimball explores this aspect of the decade primarily through an essay
on
The New York Review of Books,
which was christened by Tom
Wolfe as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic." He traces its ori–
gins to the early 1960s, when a newspaper strike in New York shut
down the functional book reviews and heightened awareness of the
need for a better forum for the written word. He records the high hopes
for a sophisticated and knowledgeable review that would strengthen
elite cultural standards. Kimball contrasts this cultural elitism with the
crudeness of the
Review's
revolutionary zeal, including, during the
urban riots, a cover drawing of a Molotov cocktail, complete with
instructions for its composition. The meeting of the "radical" and
"chic" universes of discourse throughout the sixties serves Kimball as
an unfailing source of ironic commentary in a literary tradition which
goes back to Henry James's portrait of Princess Casamassima.
One ironic post-sixties variation of this theme is found in an anecdote
related by the founding father of
The New York Review of Books,
Jason
Epstein. Epstein had been both a friend and colleague of Vladimir
Nabokov until the 1960s. With Epstein's radical opposition to the Viet-
