This new life of the 19th-century’s most notorious literary celebrity successfully revivifies the poet for our times—albeit not without applying a few shocks. Eisler (O’Keefe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, 1991, etc.) has found in Byron a subject well-fitted to her ability to take frank measure of transgression. In an effective opening vignette, Eisler recreates the contentious scene, after his untimely death at war with revolutionaries in Greece, when Byron’s associates in England collectively burned his shocking memoirs. Then, as if reconstituting those lost recollections, Eisler reconstructs his experiences, however sensational, as closely as possible—without, however, overindulging in speculation of the “he must have felt” variety. While she ably handles Byron’s erotically charged youth and school days, the author comes into her own when handling the heart of his story: his sexual affairs—including the notorious liaison with his own half-sister—conducted in Regency London and then in Italian exile; his travels in Greece, the Levant, and Europe with the Shelleys and others; and above all, his ambitious poetic productions, which would transfix all Europe. In part through close readings of his verses, Eisler captures the urgency of his homosexual loves and the viciousness with which he turned on his wife. While Eisler occasionally crosses the line into the lurid, her reporting, rendered in beautiful prose, seems accurate, even when she argues that Byron, himself molested as a child, molested children in turn. It helps that she also emphasizes Byron’s wider sensuality—exploring his shame over his lameness, his weight issues, and his compulsive athleticism—and the absurdly complex money issues that dogged him. In such contexts, Byron’s wild sexual adventures seem only a part of a lifestyle that was so far ahead of its time as to be not just modern, but perhaps even postmodern. Occasional local crimes of sensationalism, then, contribute to the singular virtue of this volume: it’s the rare doorstop of a literary biography that’s also a legitimate page-turner. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-41299-9
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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