In time for the centennial of Huxley's birth, a journalistic miscellany—of pieces delivered over the radio, at the podium, and in magazines and newspapers—from the same period as Brave New World (1932). In addition to a voracious intellect, Huxley possessed a talent for inhabiting the Zeitgeist. In the pessimistic 1930s he became increasingly concerned with the issues of his times, such as mass society and political instability. This transitional period fell between his early career in the English country-house literary circles he satirized in Crome Yellow (1921) and his later status as expatriate mescaline mystic in California, where he wrote The Doors of Perception (1954). In this era in England and Italy he wrote the pieces collected here for the first time. The ideas in flux are the same as those he played with in Brave New World or earnestly advocated in his semi-mystic political tract, Ends and Means (1937). Huxley's early fascination with Pavlovian conditioning, Communist industrial planning, Fascist social order, and eugenics emerge in disquieting relief but are counterpointed with his later punditry for economic reform, pacifism, and sociological realignment. All these pieces were intended for immediate consumption, however, and seem more dated than his novels and serious essays. Still, his keen perception comes through with the unique immediacy of journalism, whether describing mines in northern England or four dull hours listening to Parliamentary speeches, and his polymathic wit entertainingly skewers fraudulent industrialists and fascist potentates alike. Editor Bradshaw, who is writing a biography of Huxley, includes his own essays on the influences on Huxley's work of H.L. Mencken's social satire and of H.G. Wells's political ideology. This idiosyncratic pendant to his major works reveals Huxley in a phase state between his more familiar roles.
Pub Date: July 15, 1994
ISBN: 1-56663-055-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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
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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