By age 20, when he mysteriously renounced his poetic career without publishing a single volume, Rimbaud had created a body of poetry that many still consider perfect; at age 27, after a brief life of wandering in Europe, he went to North Africa, where he amassed a small fortune in trading guns and coffee. At the same age, though a century later, Borer, a French Rimbaud specialist, accompanied by a TV crew filming a documentary of Rimbaud's last ten years, followed Rimbaud's footsteps—producing along with the film this fascinating, bewildering, and innovative study. Joining the great array of ``Rimbaudians,'' as Borer calls them—the many writers, from the poet's own sister to Enid Starkie and Henry Miller, whom Rimbaud inspired—Borer explores the puzzles and eccentricities of Rimbaud: his fascination with evil; his sensuality; his iconoclasm and rage; his experiments with drugs, love, religion; his restlessness; his crimes—he had a police record in every country he visited and provoked Paul Verlaine, his lover whom he tortured with knives, into shooting him. Despising convention, courtesy, morality (``a weakness of the brain''), glorifying evil and excess, Rimbaud became a permanent symbol of adolescent rebellion before literally escaping from his own identity as the ``visionary'' that he described in the one book he published during his life, an autobiography of his own mind called A Season in Hell. Borer searches for the vestiges of this identity in the adventurer-entrepreneur Rimbaud became—and, in the process, finds the poet in himself. An odd combination of Rimbaud himself, his words and his experiments with form, and the assertive, fragmentary style of the TV documentary on which the book is based—a very challenging read for those uninitiated in Rimbaud and ``Rimbaudrary.'' The translation must have been a trial: What to make of ``his bulimia for reading remained unsated''?
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-07594-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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
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