With lively, colorful writing and inspired practical advice, this guide earns a spot along with Clark’s Writing Tools (2006)...
Just when you think Poynter Institute senior scholar Clark, who has written some of the best books on the writer’s craft, has covered everything related to the subject, he digs deep into literature and excavates a gold mine of artistic strategies for great writing.
While his last book, How to Write Short (2013), examined pithy prose in today’s ubiquitous media, this illuminating volume focuses on superb writing through the centuries. Readers may not consider the work of ancient poets Homer and Virgil as examples of cinematic writing, but these scribes, who zoom in and out of scenes with words, have a lot to teach us. Clark cites a passage from Virgil’s The Aeneid that describes a raging storm at sea, noting that centuries “before anyone dreamed of the aerial shot or…special effects…there was Virgil creating in language the vertiginous seascape of the drowning sailors.” Clark also has a flair for language as he describes one of Virgil’s “amazing” sentences as “coiling and uncoiling like the serpents it describes, directing our eyes back and forth, in and out, from the action of the serpents to the movements of the sea, then close enough to see eyes of blood and fire.” The Great Gatsby yields an intricately built architecture in which F. Scott Fitzgerald plants “strategic treasures”—words and images—at the end of his first chapter that are echoed in the luminous, oft-quoted last four paragraphs of the novel. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, writes Clark, school us in the uses of foreboding and foreshadowing. Gustave Flaubert employed small gestures and domestic details to reveal Emma Bovary’s frame of mind. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer demonstrates poetic flow in his ecstatic descriptions of spring. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye offers the lyrical use of repetition, not to be confused with redundancy.
With lively, colorful writing and inspired practical advice, this guide earns a spot along with Clark’s Writing Tools (2006) as essential reading for writers. Recommended for book lovers as well.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-28217-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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