Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events

xvii, 573 pp. "The best of Murray Kempton's columns, essays, reviews, and reportage, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events is, in the words of David Remnick, "like watching an endless parade of the great characters of American life: Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Kempton's sense of the absurd and his ability to sketch a scene in a few sentences, to deflate the pompous in a phrase, make the parade as rich as any great novel....[These pieces] constitute not merely a set of triumphant riffs, a scatter of portraits. They add up to a portrait of their author."