A moving portrait of two unalike but kindred spirits who did indeed “Dare [to] see a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’ ”
The editor criticized for dumbing down the great American poet’s work gets a fairer assessment from literary biographer Wineapple (Hawthorne, 2003, etc.).
Dickinson (1830–86) wrote her first letter to Higginson (1823–1911) in 1862, coyly asking, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” She had not chosen him at random; known as an ardent proponent of women’s rights, he had just published an article in the Atlantic Monthly offering advice to aspiring writers. Higginson responded positively, but advised Dickinson to “delay” publication and made some attempts to regularize her unconventional prosody and punctuation. Ever since, scholars have depicted him as the clueless Victorian who condescended to genius. On the contrary, Wineapple demonstrates in her astute assessment of their quarter-century epistolary relationship (they met in person only a few times), he was in awe of her from the beginning, well aware that his considerable gifts as a polemicist and essayist paled in comparison to her brilliance. Quoting extensively from Dickinson’s letters to Higginson and the poems she enclosed in them (his side of the correspondence has been lost), the author shows a powerful—and sexually suggestive—writer who disguised her forcefulness in coquettish, sometimes simpering prose. Higginson was not fooled. He had never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much,” he wrote to his wife after their first meeting. “I am glad not to live near her.” At a safe distance, he relished the privilege of being the favored recipient of “thoughts of such a quality.” Wineapple never makes quite clear what Higginson gave the poet other than a sympathetic ear, and she devotes too many pages to his ardent abolitionism, which had little impact on Dickinson. Still, she paints a warm portrait of an honorable man remarkably free from the prejudices of his time whose appeal for his sequestered friend—and appreciation of her artistry—is evident. The biographer blames co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd for most of the editorial meddling in the posthumous 1890 and 1891 editions of Dickinson’s work.
A moving portrait of two unalike but kindred spirits who did indeed “Dare [to] see a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’ ”Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4401-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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