Approachable, effective excerpts afford breathtaking encounters with genius.
An anthology of the acclaimed poet and essayist’s most searing prose.
This compendium demonstrates how Rich (Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010, 2010, etc.), who won numerous prestigious awards during her life (1929-2012), also distinguished herself as a formidable public intellectual, literary critic, and cultural theorist. Arguing that the masculine world order has discounted the perspectives of women, Rich devoted her life to fostering “a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.” Her essays leveraged her poems and journal entries as illustrations because she sought to dissolve the barriers between the personal, the political, and the aesthetic. In the section taken from her landmark book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), the author contrasts the supposed bliss of maternity with the “anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself” that she felt as a mother of three young children. This collection features representative samples of Rich’s signature critical move, the “re-vision” of literary foremothers whose works had long been misappropriated and misunderstood. She claims, for instance, that Emily Dickinson’s reclusive lifestyle was not a sentimental tragedy but rather a practical and liberating choice for an ambitious writer conscious of her unorthodox brilliance and that the carefully controlled style in A Room of One’s Own enabled Virginia Woolf to write for women while being overheard by men. Rich’s outspoken alliance with lesbian feminists has tended to discourage those readers who could most benefit from her work, yet her thoughts about gender and identity from the 1970s and ’80s sound all too current: “A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution.” Feminist poet and literary critic Gilbert skillfully selects examples that convey the considerable breadth of Rich’s purview as an essayist and exhibit her characteristic strategy of rejecting surface explanations and turning experience around in the light of subjective truth.
Approachable, effective excerpts afford breathtaking encounters with genius.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65236-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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