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solbloch's review against another edition
3.0
Sharp pointed analysis throughout, but most of the last ~60 pages (the History as Novel part) was just not that interesting to me. On the other hand, the bulk of the book, the novel part wherein our protagonist (a title at which Mailer would likely balk) participates in the story was great. Meeting Noam Chomsky at Occoquan, the up and coming intellectual of around 30 who's name had been made in the MIT linguistics department, Lowell the great poet and his softness, Goodman, de Grazia, etc. Characters. But eh, it was okay. Took awhile to read, got obsessed with photography briefly (that will continue, just in a slightly more measured capacity).
blueyorkie's review against another edition
4.0
"Armies of the Night" (1968) is a sort of series of chronicles on the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, in other words, the "march on the Pentagon." The author depicts us, in bright colors, without hiding anything of their weaknesses, the leaders of the opposition and their troops: students and professors, black and Latino walkers, Protestant pastors, "liberal bourgeois," hippies... He shows how these people who came from various backgrounds to protest against the Vietnam War, united by courage, did not hesitate to confront the police and military forces with their bare hands. Many protesters ended up in jail, starting with Mailer himself.
odin45mp's review against another edition
2.0
This book easily doubled my knowledge about Vietnam War protests here in the United States. My education even through college had at best a couple of pages on Vietnam, focused on the larger US-USSR conflict and the ideologies.
I knew about the Kent State shootings.
I know plenty about the war itself as viewed through Hollywood's eyes: Rambo II, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now.
Now I know about the march on the Pentagon.
Norman Mailer paints a good picture of the events through his somewhat fictionalized retelling in the first half of the book. The copy I read is shelved under Biography & Autobiography, but without knowing how many liberties he took in the first person recollection it is hard to say how "true" the telling of the event is. I struggled with parts of this as he would go down rabbit trails or jump through parts of the day.
Then we have a more documentary or history book straight journalism look at the events, all dry facts. I liked this better as it gave me a more clinical, less emotional view of the facts. I learned a lot about the negotiations behind the scenes leading up to large public demonstrations, and the politics of the disparate factions that were coming together to protest the war. In particular how the African-American group splintered off because they didn't want to be seen as too "violent" or "revolutionary" and wanted their revolutionary energies and arrests to count towards their own civil rights movement. I was chilled as I read the cold calculus on whether the protestors would be too violent and incite action or garner government sympathy, or if the police tasked with patrolling the event would respond in an unwarranted, violent fashion that would be impossible to predict or control - much how we saw police violence erupt again and again in 2020. It saddened me to see how little things have changed in a half century.
I'm glad I read it, but I am not sure I will read it again.
I knew about the Kent State shootings.
I know plenty about the war itself as viewed through Hollywood's eyes: Rambo II, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now.
Now I know about the march on the Pentagon.
Norman Mailer paints a good picture of the events through his somewhat fictionalized retelling in the first half of the book. The copy I read is shelved under Biography & Autobiography, but without knowing how many liberties he took in the first person recollection it is hard to say how "true" the telling of the event is. I struggled with parts of this as he would go down rabbit trails or jump through parts of the day.
Then we have a more documentary or history book straight journalism look at the events, all dry facts. I liked this better as it gave me a more clinical, less emotional view of the facts. I learned a lot about the negotiations behind the scenes leading up to large public demonstrations, and the politics of the disparate factions that were coming together to protest the war. In particular how the African-American group splintered off because they didn't want to be seen as too "violent" or "revolutionary" and wanted their revolutionary energies and arrests to count towards their own civil rights movement. I was chilled as I read the cold calculus on whether the protestors would be too violent and incite action or garner government sympathy, or if the police tasked with patrolling the event would respond in an unwarranted, violent fashion that would be impossible to predict or control - much how we saw police violence erupt again and again in 2020. It saddened me to see how little things have changed in a half century.
I'm glad I read it, but I am not sure I will read it again.
icecreamjane's review against another edition
3.0
It's enjoyable to read...for a while. Then Mailer's writing just really wears on you and you have to take a mental break. But it is good for exploring what is history; how is it created? what does it consist of? can there be multiple versions of truth?
elpanek's review against another edition
4.0
During the run-up to the 2016 election and its aftermath, I found myself thinking about the mid-to-late 1960's, which, by many accounts, was the last period of great sociopolitical tumult in the U.S. How did we find our way out it? How did we stay afloat? As with any great challenge, personal or societal, the answers are found in the work of great writers who are adept at creating coherence out of something that is sprawling, overwhelming, traumatizing, and chaotic. I found this in Mailer's book: a coherent artistic rendering of protest, corruption, a polarized public, distorted realities, a fever of violence and insanity. Just what the doctor ordered.
It is the art (and, sometimes, the coherence) that is missing from most accounts of political foment, because most accounts are either of the moment (news), designed with persuasion as the goal (many documentaries; many histories; many pop political science books), or are an attempt at chronicling human events as if viewing them from a great distance (i.e., 1,000 years in the future). All perspectives on political upheaval have their place, though right now I feel choked by the unified, hectoring voice of blogs and news editorials that circulate through social media. Mailer offers a way out.
The vantage point is that of someone attempting to write a novel AND a history of something that had just happened - the 1967 march on the Pentagon. I'm not sure that The Armies of the Night really works as either a novel OR a history, but instead feels more like the mix of personal history and extended essay that became New Journalism. Whatever you want to call it, its chief asset is the personal voice, and Mailer's is more traditionally masculine - more earthy, more aggressive, and drunker - than the rest of his New Journalism cohort (something closer to Hemingway or Bellow). He's not for everyone. But even if you wouldn't like to hang out with the guy, he does have a way with words.
It's also instructive to read an attempt to historicize the present because of the ways in which it fails to predict how the subject would eventually live on in cultural memory. Pretty much the only things I knew about the march on the Pentagon were that hippies stuffed flowers into soldiers' gun barrels (which is mentioned in passing in the book) and that Abbie Hoffman actually believed that protesters could make the Pentagon levitate with concentrated psychic energy. Mailer's account makes the event seem more ragged and disorderly and real, more like something you can imagine happening next month.
There's also a funny little cameo by Noam Chomsky who, at the time the book was written, wasn't the relatively-well-known public intellectual he would become. It's hard not to speculate as to who the nascent public intellectuals of today's political movements might be, but it's better to leave such speculation aside while reading this book and appreciate it for what it is: an insider's attempt to process an event that could've been just another protest, a comic failure, or the start of a political revolution as it is happening, not knowing the outcome.
It is the art (and, sometimes, the coherence) that is missing from most accounts of political foment, because most accounts are either of the moment (news), designed with persuasion as the goal (many documentaries; many histories; many pop political science books), or are an attempt at chronicling human events as if viewing them from a great distance (i.e., 1,000 years in the future). All perspectives on political upheaval have their place, though right now I feel choked by the unified, hectoring voice of blogs and news editorials that circulate through social media. Mailer offers a way out.
The vantage point is that of someone attempting to write a novel AND a history of something that had just happened - the 1967 march on the Pentagon. I'm not sure that The Armies of the Night really works as either a novel OR a history, but instead feels more like the mix of personal history and extended essay that became New Journalism. Whatever you want to call it, its chief asset is the personal voice, and Mailer's is more traditionally masculine - more earthy, more aggressive, and drunker - than the rest of his New Journalism cohort (something closer to Hemingway or Bellow). He's not for everyone. But even if you wouldn't like to hang out with the guy, he does have a way with words.
It's also instructive to read an attempt to historicize the present because of the ways in which it fails to predict how the subject would eventually live on in cultural memory. Pretty much the only things I knew about the march on the Pentagon were that hippies stuffed flowers into soldiers' gun barrels (which is mentioned in passing in the book) and that Abbie Hoffman actually believed that protesters could make the Pentagon levitate with concentrated psychic energy. Mailer's account makes the event seem more ragged and disorderly and real, more like something you can imagine happening next month.
There's also a funny little cameo by Noam Chomsky who, at the time the book was written, wasn't the relatively-well-known public intellectual he would become. It's hard not to speculate as to who the nascent public intellectuals of today's political movements might be, but it's better to leave such speculation aside while reading this book and appreciate it for what it is: an insider's attempt to process an event that could've been just another protest, a comic failure, or the start of a political revolution as it is happening, not knowing the outcome.
coffeecrusader's review against another edition
4.0
"Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History."
Mailer is an egotist and not ruled by shame. He revels in the negative portrayal of himself, constantly debases himself. The egotist's self knows no bounds. The narcissist is empty and is ruled by shame. Mailer, in all his issues, saw ego everywhere and hated those who operated behind suppressed ego. Here, as evidenced by the book's subtitle (History as a Novel, the Novel as History) Mailer looks for the contradictions which synthesize into human personality. Armies of the Night is a book of human error. He does this all with astounding language that occasionally bumps up against the border of poetry--a language which nearly means nothing.
This is Mailer as prophet, as a self-professed "Left Conservative," as he understand the US in Vietnam as the product of the Left (but not the New Left). This is a book about the promise of America through one's lived experience; Mailer challenges the reader to mine that for themselves.
Mailer is an egotist and not ruled by shame. He revels in the negative portrayal of himself, constantly debases himself. The egotist's self knows no bounds. The narcissist is empty and is ruled by shame. Mailer, in all his issues, saw ego everywhere and hated those who operated behind suppressed ego. Here, as evidenced by the book's subtitle (History as a Novel, the Novel as History) Mailer looks for the contradictions which synthesize into human personality. Armies of the Night is a book of human error. He does this all with astounding language that occasionally bumps up against the border of poetry--a language which nearly means nothing.
This is Mailer as prophet, as a self-professed "Left Conservative," as he understand the US in Vietnam as the product of the Left (but not the New Left). This is a book about the promise of America through one's lived experience; Mailer challenges the reader to mine that for themselves.
quinndm's review against another edition
3.0
Mailer's mastery of the word is astounding, but his style... his books leave me in inspired awe and, at the same time, exhausted and frustrated.
This book -- his firsthand account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon -- reminds us about how important, and dangerous, those times were and how vital it was for more people to stand up and speak out. And, now, almost 50 years later, the book is more relevant than ever.
This book -- his firsthand account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon -- reminds us about how important, and dangerous, those times were and how vital it was for more people to stand up and speak out. And, now, almost 50 years later, the book is more relevant than ever.