by Albert Goldbarth ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
With essays spanning more than 20 years, this collection provides a surefire introduction to Goldbarth’s prose—but the trip...
For those who think clearly written prose is for sissies, Goldbarth is back—with a representative essay collection that both dazzles and stupefies with its complications.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his poetry, Goldbarth is also an acknowledged innovator of the literary essay, with three collections to his credit (Dark Waves and Light Matter, 1999, etc.). Some of his best-known works appear in this collection, including “After Yitzl” and “Parade March from That Creaturely World” (both of which introduce his preoccupations with the movement of time and memory). All the essays display his trademark mélange of dense poetic phrasing, multiple story lines, historical events, and pop culture—which, for sheer bulk alone, is amazing. But while his knowledge of arcana, language play, and dexterity at interweaving stories (most notably in “Worlds”) may astound, it will also serve to keep readers away. The mounds of facts (whether about Madame Curie or Krazy Kat or Theseus) and overwrought phrases (about food, sex, the galaxy) are too much for the average well-read philistine. Reading through the mass of references and odd locutions on faith (and without a Columbia Encyclopedia at hand) erodes much of the emotional impact of the experience. The result is an admiration of Goldbarth’s work combined with very little enjoyment of it—and a perplexity as to what the point of his writing is in the first place. Is it to show the vastness of the human mind at work and the inability of two randomly meeting minds to connect? If so, why read?
With essays spanning more than 20 years, this collection provides a surefire introduction to Goldbarth’s prose—but the trip may not be much fun the first time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55597-321-3
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
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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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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