Hallucinatory and quite mad (Shelley would approve): helpful in deciphering his work but hardly his life.
From Economist editor and biographer Wroe (The Perfect Prince, 2003, etc.), a dreamy, decidedly unorthodox biography of the Romantic poet.
Wroe hastily dispatches the biographical facts, then subsequently jumps around, dropping names and dates she assumes the reader is familiar with. Born in Sussex in 1792 to a landowner and MP against whom he violently rebelled, Shelley attended Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled in 1811 for an incendiary pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. He capped off an epistolary romance by eloping with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he abandoned within two years. In 1814, he ran off with Mary Godwin, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (who had been Shelley’s mentor) and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In Pisa and Florence, Mary and Percy wrote, lived beyond their means, maintained friendships with Byron and others, then grew estranged as Shelley flirted with their neighbor, Jane Williams. He drowned while sailing with her husband in 1822. For Wroe, these facts are far less important than Shelley’s intense devotion to beauty and to the poet’s role as seer. He dedicated his life to those ideals, probably under a heavy addiction to laudanum. Essential here are the author’s profound readings of and sympathy for Shelley’s poetry, from Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound to A Defence of Poetry. She also nicely documents Shelley’s sense of social justice on the one hand, his flagrant egoism on the other.
Hallucinatory and quite mad (Shelley would approve): helpful in deciphering his work but hardly his life.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42493-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.
Beloved, controversial performer discusses fame and the deeper meanings of his life.
Common, subject of Fox News’ ire following his White House poetry recitation, has long been acclaimed as a thoughtful and deft hip-hop artist. In his memoir—co-authored by Bradley (Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, 2009, etc.)—he suggests great consciousness of the cultural legacy he carries: “Chicago blackness gave me understanding, awareness, street sense, and a rhythm. I learned the way that soulful people move, act, and talk.” He portrays himself as an openhearted, curious kid, trying to understand the tumult of Chicago’s African-American South Side. Obsessed with girls from an early age, he would go to the city’s museums to meet them. At the same time, he was rhyming in private, and he gave up basketball in high school to concentrate on rap, which he saw as similarly competitive. Common writes frankly about his youthful involvement with gang culture, portrayed as an inevitable rite of passage that became increasingly violent: “Crack hit the South Side of Chicago like a balled up fist.” Varied influences—his mother, friends, artistic ambitions—steered him away from it and toward a more “conscious” existence. By 1989, his early demos as Common Sense were drawing industry attention, and he dropped out of college to pursue this calling, over his mother’s objections. Much of what follows is a funny, honest showbiz narrative, moving from hip-hop to film acting. Interestingly, each chapter begins with a “letter” to someone significant in his life: e.g., his mother and father (early chapters discuss their tumultuous relationship), Emmett Till, former girlfriend Erykah Badu and collaborator Kanye West. Additionally, his mother offers occasional italicized counterpoint. As a memoir, the book succeeds based on Common’s candor, intelligence and charm, despite occasional artificial passages and broad platitudes, and he writes powerfully about his connection with President Obama.
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2587-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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