A collection of previously published essays and reviews (The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, etc.), seemingly more the work of a competent grad student than an imaginative novelist, and sure to disappoint those who enjoyed Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990). In essays about her favorite Victorians (Robert Browning and George Eliot) and moderns such as Ford Madox Ford and William Golding, Byatt, a former lecturer in English and American Literature at the Univ. of London, explores the relations between narrative and religion. These writers, Byatt suggests, vindicate the ``fictive form'' as the appropriate place to resolve the problem ``of the real'' in a postreligious world. For Byatt, Browning is ``a poet who writes of men and women, all separately incarnate, all separately aware of their necessarily and splendidly limited ways of infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn.'' Eliot's intelligence, she concludes, ``combined thought and feeling in a new form of poetic but ironic realist fiction.'' In perhaps the most accessible and persuasive essay here (``Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford''), Byatt describes Ford as a writer who taught us the distinction between the ``great lie'' and ``the hard ideas of truth.'' And a number of her reviews on writers as varied as Toni Morrison, whom she admires, and Barbara Pym, whom she does not (``[Pym] appears gentler than Spark or Weldon but is also infinitely less generous, humane and imaginative'') are intelligent, perceptive, and refreshingly opinionated. Most often confined by narrow academic parameters to lengthy quotes and tentatively advanced ideas, Byatt's rich inventive talents are well served here only rarely.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40511-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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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