A deft and memorable collection with both focus and elbow room from a class act in the world of magazine journalism.
Twenty-one stylish, purposeful, wide-ranging, and carefully wrought essays, most previously published in the New Yorker.
Wilkinson begins with a sampling of short pieces, no more than a few of pages each, that take fun in tweaking celebrities and often display a certain impish charm (“My new best friend is Cash Money,” he declares in one). A few of the other, longer pieces step off the beaten path to introduce a friend of Larry King’s, profile Elmore Leonard’s researcher, or offer a glimpse into the strange world of funny cars (“a peevish and irascible species of hot rod”) and a practitioner of the sport, John Force (“Fundamental American archetypes intersected to produce the solitary, romantic, migratory, and daredevil elements of Force’s nature”). Most of the essays are serious, at times fighting for control over an unruly emotion or subject as in the two sympathetic and melancholy essays on New Yorker editor William Maxwell that were later expanded into My Mentor (2002). A crushingly poignant portrait of a boy/man with Asperger’s Syndrome stands in striking contrast to a hair-raising one of mass-murderer John Wayne Gacy (“he has said that the only crime he is guilty of was operating a cemetery without a license”) based on interviews with him in prison. As creepy in its own way, though far sadder, is an essay on suicides and suicide notes: “Life isn’t worth the bother. . . . I know I didn’t say much, but I am in a hurry,” wrote one man. In an especially puissant piece, Wilkinson explores his sense of fatherhood and the eccentricities of his child. “Throughout my son’s life,” he muses, “I have now and then thought of him as a household divinity—that is, as an uncorrupted presence of joy.”
A deft and memorable collection with both focus and elbow room from a class act in the world of magazine journalism.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-12311-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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