by Anthony Heilbut ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996
With its unprecedented picture of Mann's character and accomplishments, Heilbut's biography opens up an important new...
This recursive, elliptical study of Thomas Mann's life and writings successfully captures the total Mann, albeit with some sacrifice of narrative cohesion.
With terse elegance, Heilbut (whose previous book was a study of 1930s German artistic and intellectual refugees) knots together diverse moments from Mann's long career. Looping from considerations of definitive late novels like Doctor Faustus back into descriptions of Mann's youth, Heilbut traces how the writer's introversion and self-obsession underwrote his telling commentaries on German society. Heilbut notes that Mann's birth was roughly contemporaneous with the political unification of Germany, the legal emancipation of German Jewry, and the popularization of the term "homosexual.'' Detailed critical readings of Mann's private and public works explore the author's psyche while showing how Mann's literary consciousness became a theater for the exploration of the license and limits of German, Jewish, and homosexual self-expression. Heilbut recounts, for example, how the classic novella Death in Venice celebrates homoerotic longing while depicting a national idol dying amid debased tourism. Boldly venturing where other recent Mann biographers—Ronald Hayman and Donald Prater—tread only haltingly, Heilbut cites letters and journal entries in contending that the straitlaced Mann not only acted on his homoerotic impulses, but moreover had tacit understandings with his family about his orientation. Heilbut's path is emphatically not linear; the best recent chronological account remains Hayman's. And in large part because of his book's associative structure, Heilbut fails to capture the force of Mann's activism against Hitler and subsequent exile with the acuity that Prater displays. Nevertheless, Heilbut does convey plenty of relevant intellectual history, connecting Mann to contemporaries like Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, and noting the important influence on his work of writers like Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Whitman.
With its unprecedented picture of Mann's character and accomplishments, Heilbut's biography opens up an important new perspective in Mann studies.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-55633-X
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
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by John Carey
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by John Carey
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