Hamilton's book reviews and ``literary articles'' cover a broad span of time and a wide range of interesting and uninteresting subjects. There's little here in the way of penetrating analysis or critical energy to lift these pieces beyond the time-bound immediacy of the column or weekly review. He leads with his best, the first piece being ``A Biographer's Misgivings,'' wherein he discusses his own difficulties in writing and researching the lives of the poet Robert Lowell and the elusive J.D. Salinger. Sorting through the conflicting versions of important episodes in Lowell's tangled life left him wondering ``which Lowell life'' he should attend to. The Salinger biography, of course, with which he hoped ``to arouse in Salinger a sort of grudging curiosity,'' ended in the famous lawsuit and the publication of ``the legal version'' of his book. Most of the other pieces are straight book reviews with little resonance beyond their first appearance. His look at two widely different Sylvia Plath biographies elicits a somewhat muddled and unsolicited defense of the much-maligned Ted Hughes, while his take on a Robert Graves bio reminds him that the poet has ``always been thought of as a bit unsound . . . with . . . a touch of the bogus.'' He has high praise for Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint but little use for the ``weary fictioneering'' of Norman Mailer's ``Nile-long course of Ancient Evenings.'' Aldous Huxley's letters, he notes, show ``what his novels led us to expect: the apotheosis of arid intellectualism.'' A few of the essays will leave American readers cold and bewildered: the doings at the 1982 World Cup; a tough week for the cricketers at Lord's; an incomprehensible look at three books on the financial foibles of the Spurs football team. Hamilton's half-page foreword insufficiently introduces these writings: One wants background, grounding, some element to link such disparate topics into a unified body of work.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-48397-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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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