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ALWAYS STRAIGHT AHEAD

Name: ALWAYS STRAIGHT AHEAD
Author: Alma Neuman
ISBN: 0-8071-1792-7

A MEMOIR

by Alma Neuman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1993

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A memoir in the form of an answer to a love letter delivered 20 years late, by the second wife of James Agee. ``Wanting so badly to answer'' that letter, mislaid in the interim, from the long-dead Agee, Neuman has finally eased her grief by writing the candid story of her life. As much an account of love and friendship betrayed as a memoir of 1930's intellectual bohemia and of postwar Germany, the narrative also describes a journey to painful self-knowledge and acts as a rueful confession of a tendency never to look back but to look optimistically ``always straight ahead''—with not always happy results. The daughter of mismatched parents—a cultivated mother and a barely literate but successful father—Neuman, an accomplished musician, was attracted early on to intellectual households where music and literature were important. Her first boyfriend, Frisk Saunders, was the son of an eminent professor who, with his wife, befriended the young woman, despite reservations about her Jewish background. It was in Saunders's home that Neuman first met Agee, who soon married Frisk's sister—a union quickly ended by Agee's affair with Neuman. The author traveled to the American South with Agee, visiting the families that he was to write about in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and she came to know Agee's friends; but when Agee was unfaithful, she fled with their son, baby Joel, to Mexico, where she met and later married German refugee Bodo Uhse. After WW II, the couple moved to East Germany, where Uhse, a longtime Communist and respected writer, enjoyed special privileges. His infidelity and an increasing unease with the regime, however, led Neuman to return to the US, where she finally learned how to live without depending on a husband's status. A life of great range and interest, told with disarming frankness by a woman of remarkable zest and experience. More than a literary footnote. (Photos—not seen.)

Pub Date: March 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-8071-1792-7

Page Count: 165

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

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ART AND PHYSICS

PARALLEL VISIONS IN SPACE, TIME, AND LIGHT

by Leonard Shlain ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 1991

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A California surgeon explores the striking parallels in the evolution of Western art and science in this enlightening exploration of where ideas come from and how they enter the consciousness of a culture. Though art and science are traditionally considered antithetical disciplines—with art dependent on intuition for its development and science on logic and sequential thinking—both nevertheless rely on an initial burst of inspiration regarding the nature of reality, and in Western culture the two have followed separate but remarkably similar paths. Shlain offers detailed anecdotes from the history of Western culture—from the ancient Greeks' penchant for single-melody choruses and blank rectangles, through the fragmented art and science of the Medieval period, to modern art's redefinition of reality and the relativity revolution in science—to illustrate how major movements in art have generally preceded scientific breakthroughs based on equivalent ideas, despite the artists and scientists involved having remained largely ignorant of one another's work. Shlain's suggestion that scientists have not so much been inspired by artists but have received initial inspiration from the same source—bringing to mind the possibility of a universal mind from which such ideas spring—is an intriguing one that offers a new window through which to view the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. A fascinating and provocative discussion—slow in coalescing but worth the wait. (Seventy-two b&w photographs and 15 diagrams.)

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1991

ISBN: 0-688-09752-9

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

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by Leonard Shlain

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THE HEADLESS BUST

A MELANCHOLY MEDITATION FOR THE FALSE MILLENNIUM

by Edward Gorey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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A hilariously suave (previously unpublished) morality tale from the master of understated mayhem and apocalypse (The Unstrung Harp, p. 572, etc.). Its wonderfully dark pictures and text detail a dream journey undertaken, at century’s end, by dull-looking Edmund Gravel and an accompanying arachnoid figure, the Bahhumbug, to a “remote provincial town” where polite society’s veneer is blithely whisked away and assorted beautiful people are revealed in all their mendacity, folly, and awful bad luck. As always, Gorey’s trademark rhyming couplets are filled with inexplicably funny, sad, and somehow beautiful occurrences (e.g., “Sir U___ fell from a speeding train,/Which did some damage to his brain,/And after that he did not know /How to pronounce the letter O”). Calling this delightful tale its author’s “Vision of Judgment” or Inferno would be like breaking a butterfly on a wheel—with which image, come to think of it, Gorey might do something ineffably sinister and entertaining.