This affecting second collection of personal essays from contemporary master of the short story Dubus (Dancing After Hours, 1996, etc.) displays the distinctive direct and elegant style and often reflects the masculine Catholic worldview that inform much of his fiction. Dubus says he was an active runner and walker before he lost his left leg at the knee and the use of his right one in an accident on a highway just north of Boston in the late 1980s. That experience, his ensuing physical struggle, and the dissolution of his marriage were written about in his first volume of essays, Broken Vessels, in 1991. Here he achieves an intensely personalized effect because of his technique of filtering his experience through the perspective of his faith. It’s also a perspective of suffering, for Dubus continues to live every day in physical pain, as he explains in the at once bleak and redemptive closing piece, “Witness,” about his recent encounter with a woman who saw his accident. Dubus is commanding and graceful as ever on the physicality and spirituality of love between men and women; and he writes with humility and honesty of his decision to live life in a wheelchair after an agonizing period of physical therapy; and of the occasional moment of radiance, such as his being carried onto the lawn by his older children to play ball with his younger ones. Wisely or not, he includes a letter of complaint to Amtrak that turns into a tough if dulcet rant. At least one recent critic, while acknowledging his gifts, has identified in Dubus the tendency, before and after his injury, to locate the emotional center of his writing in an overly indulgent, if bittersweet, nostalgia for the irrecoverable past. Still Dubus is an American original, and his talent continues to surprise. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43108-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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