Though Stoner has proven to be a novel whose compassionate themes have timeless appeal, this portrait of the irksome...
A biography of a nearly forgotten mid-20th-century American writer.
A notable literary sensation of recent years is the belated success of the 1965 novel Stoner. This quietly intense story of an English professor at a small Midwestern college was the third of only four published novels by author John Williams (1922-1994). Though the book was favorably reviewed, it sold poorly. But thanks to the efforts of devoted readers and fellow writers, the book has slowly gained a cult following, which led to a reprint in 2006. The larger success was established first through foreign editions before gaining recognition in the U.S. Literary biographer Shields (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee: From Scout to Go Set a Watchman, 2016, etc.) provides a respectful and well-documented yet occasionally lackluster overview of Williams’ life and career. Beginning with his subject’s humble origins in northeast Texas, Shields tracks his experiences in the Army during World War II, early academic and writing pursuits, and then his 30-year tenure as a professor at the University of Denver, where he also served as the director of their creative writing program. Along the way, we see glimpses of Williams’ personal life, but what ultimately emerges is a fairly predictable portrait of yet another heavy-drinking, chain-smoking postwar American white male writer. He sustained a focused eye on his craft but apparently had limited interest in his students or family, and his continual and often desperate ambition for fame somewhat diminished his reputation within his department. His disdain for modernist and experimental writing and his reluctance to reflect directly on his times also left him out of sync with reading interests of that period, including the more provocative work of contemporaries ranging from Norman Mailer to John Barth.
Though Stoner has proven to be a novel whose compassionate themes have timeless appeal, this portrait of the irksome Williams, though brisk and readable, may do little to further advance the book’s cause.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1736-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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