An outdated, awkward collection of essays on art and politics from one of South Africa's great gadflies. Afrikaans poet, activist, former prisoner, and exile, Breytenbach (Return to Paradise, 1993, etc.) plunges into the cauldron of South African politics with brave abandon, criticizing both left and right, Mandela and De Klerk with equal, brutal honesty. His several ``Open Letters to Nelson Mandela''—though they have a faint odor of self-importance and self-righteousness- -are blunt and scrupulous warnings about the seductions and corruptions of power. In other, less political essays, Breytenbach steps back to consider the grand old hallmarks of the artist, at least as defined by Joyce: silence, exile, and cunning. But even here politics obtrude, as does language. While he may be a past master in verse (the few interpolated poems here are among the volume's bright spots), Breytenbach's prose is a real stumbling block, an unhealthy combination of French lit-crit abstraction and Afrikaner earthiness: ``No wonder that so many writers have withdrawn to the campuses, there like alienated baboons to deconstruct, to eviscerate and sniff at the innards of our art-the phonemes and the signifiers.'' Nor are Breytenbach's ideas startlingly original; they are a bland stew of third-world liberationist posturings, sauced with obscurantist theory, Buddhist blatherings, and overused quotes about art from the usual suspects. Because most of these essays were written in the early 1990s, when apartheid was still in place, their critiques are almost painfully out of date. And while the essays' honesty and courage are to be commended, they lack the saving humanism and insight of, for example, Orwell's essays from the '30s, qualities that would have kept them otherwise readable and trenchant. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100168-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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