Word: hentoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...REALLY DRAGGED BUT NOTHING GETS ME DOWN by Nat Hentoff. 127 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...triumph over adversity, as Nat Hentoff programs it in I'm Really Dragged but Nothing Gets Me Down, is going from resentment to resistance. The book is an attempt to put a little chest hair on that artificial category of literature known as "young-adult novels." Hentoff injects such themes as Viet Nam, racism, generation gap, civil rights, drugs, black rage, white guilt and, for old times' sake, a touch of antiSemitism. Sex is still a nono, although the vocabulary is raunched up with such words as "bastard," "damn it," and "hard...
...Hentoff, a jazz authority and wide-ranging social critic, is one of the most visible freelance writers in circulation. In this slight assignment he overcomes his modest talents for fiction with competence, concern and sympathy. But to what worthwhile end? Surely today's "young adults" do not need such pallid dramatizations of their problems when Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles do it so much better...
...Columbia recording studio, we can only look back through seven albums (The Greatest Hits of ... doesn't count) which took him from the corduroy Huck Finn of "Bob Dylan" to the out-of-focus kaleidoscope poet of "Blonde on Blonde." In the liner notes to that first album Nat Hentoff blessed him as one of "the precipitously emergent singers of folk songs in the continuing renascence of that self-assertive tradition." Self-deceptive would be more accurate. Dylan was just another work shirt and guitar buried under hyperbolic interpretation of stock songs ("House of the Rising Sun," "Freight Train Blues...
...Sport (Atheneum) by Don Asher, 40, might be called a bop novel. Written by a man who plays funky piano at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, the book tells a sprightly story about a cat who plays piano somewhere else in town. Call the Keeper (Viking) by Nat Hentoff, 41, a man-about-Manhattan who writes voluminously about jazz, race and Greenwich Village, is an ingenious pop thriller about jazz, race and Greenwich Village. The main menace is a Negro intellectual who hangs out with jazzbos and cuts up his victim on Bleecker Street...