Louis P. Masur
(Bloomsbury, April 2008)

I had never seen the photograph that is the subject of Louis Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: the Story of a Photograph That Shocked America, but I recognized it immediately, viscerally, on some unconscious level. Boston: that photo was taken in Boston. Although I moved there some fifteen years after Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer-winning photograph put an indelible face on the fury and racism of the anti-busing riots, I felt that it was part of my inheritance, part of the air that pooled, fog-like, in hot summer nights of my adopted, and adoptive, hometown.

I knew people in South Boston, where, Masur quotes Forman as saying, “I was shit.” Not well; but an Irish family-owned press printed the jackets for the books my company published. I would go down there, and we would stand on the press floor, looking at proofs, and then they would take me for drinks in places where the sense of shared community was palpable. They were honest, kind, patient. They weren’t racists. They didn’t go around beating unarmed black lawyers with flagpoles. You can say I was naïve; I was. The men I drank with in Southie might have known Joseph Rakes, the flag-wielding image of bigotry run amok.

Louis Masur understands this. The Soiling of Old Glory is a good book, scattered and over reaching at times, but genuinely nuanced about Boston’s messy history, and legitimately insightful about the nature of mass-disseminated visual imagery, its power to shape perceptions and change lives. Its power to make us see, and to remember.

From The Brooklyn Rail (April 2008)