An inspiring collection that will make a perfect gift for an aspiring writer or devoted reader.
A book about books and why people read them.
In her introduction to this impressive collection, Literary Hub contributing editor Patrick (An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy: How Manners Shaped the World, 2011, etc.) invites us in to read some prominent people’s brief and pithy reflections about the books that influenced them most. They are writers, musicians, CEOs, politicians, actors, and others, and all vouch for the power of the written word. They picked novels, children's books, sci-fi, nonfiction, poetry, and one comic book. Two of them (Mira Jacob and Sunil Yapa) picked the same book: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). They both discovered in it a language they had never heard before but instantly recognized. Besides Roy, three other authors are picked twice: Joyce, Beckett, and Salinger. For the late Alan Cheuse, Ulysses was his “working bible.” For Lev Grossman, Waiting for Godot was a “vaudeville act about life.” Nine Stories spoke to a young Elissa Schappell’s “fear of dying and disappearing.” Tommy Hilfiger, who is dyslexic and “always had difficulty in reading,” picked Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. A few contributors pick books in general, including Eric Idle: “I read omnivorously. I devour books.” Sherlock Holmes helped a shy Al Roker figure things out. Serendipity abounds. Richard Russo picked Pudd’nhead Wilson but didn’t realize how much it affected him until years later, while book review editor Ron Charles picked Russo’s Straight Man because it was the first book he reviewed and got paid for. While Fay Weldon writes about reading but not accumulating books, Gina Barreca bought Weldon’s Remember Me: “it changed everything for me.” Among the dozens of other contributors are Dave Eggers, Carl Hiassen, Fran Lebowitz, Margaret Atwood, Nelson DeMille, Susan Orlean, and Rosanne Cash. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the nonprofit 826National, which helps students improve their writing skills.
An inspiring collection that will make a perfect gift for an aspiring writer or devoted reader.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941393-65-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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