Seventy-four entries were selected out of over 5,000 nominations. Another cut might well have been made, but there is wheat...
The 25th anniversary edition of a tradition in American literature, heavier on quantity than quality but still worth perusing for some showstoppers.
Henderson’s introduction alone makes for worthwhile reading: the cast of beginning editors he names reads like the list for a literary hall of fame, and his history of the prize charts a recent trajectory of publishing at large. Among this year’s entries, essays, memoirs, and short stories dominate, with poems interspersed like an unfortunate form of punctuation: Cathleen Calbert’s “Bad Judgement,” with its dazzling and vibrant rhythm and flow, and the brutally full-bore “Six Apologies, Lord” by Olena Kalytiak Davis, among a few others, are strong exceptions. But it is a dozen or so short stories and a few memoirs and essays that deserve special recognition. Standouts include Salvatore Scibona’s “Prairie” (which evokes the solitary feel of growing up the Canadian prairie), Ken Kalfus’s “PU-239” (which tells of a nuclear reactor technician with nothing to lose), and other impressive inclusions (such as Kathleen Hill’s “The Annointed,” Jane McCaffrey’s “Berna’s Place,” and Joan Silber’s “Commendable”). Memoirs are surprisingly good: Bret Lott’s “Toward Humility” is notable, as well as Andrew Hudgins’s “Half-Answered Prayers.” And there is literary criticism, as well: in “Milton at the Bat,” Jeffrey Hammond writes a defense of Milton that reads like a modern-day defense of poetry. It is ironic that Hammond’s piece shares the stage with Seamus Heaney’s “New Staves” (an attempt to answer the question “What good is poetry?”), since a comparison of the two illustrates the imbalance that appears throughout the collection: while Heaney’s answer feels flat and rote, Hammond’s is enthusiastic and convincing.
Seventy-four entries were selected out of over 5,000 nominations. Another cut might well have been made, but there is wheat here among the chaff.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-888889-22-5
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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