Criticism is not indispensable to art,” James writes. “It is indispensable to civilization—a more inclusive thing.” His...
Superb collection of criticism at once deeply serious and deliberately accessible, more than justifying its author’s claim that “readability is intelligence.”
Born and raised in Australia, a London resident for four decades, James (The Man from Japan, 1993, etc.) possesses all the strengths of the best British literary journalists—wide-ranging erudition, a knack for the perfectly turned sentence, a seemingly effortless wit—without the besetting weakness many of his peers display for gratuitous nastiness designed to demonstrate how much smarter they are than their subjects. James, by contrast, always lives up to his declared principle that “a limiting judgment of an artist should be offered only after full submission to whatever quality made him remarkable in the first place.” (That comment occurs in one of the valuable “Postscripts,” which allow him to admit second thoughts or clarify intent without rewriting the original article.) Seamus Heaney, D.H. Lawrence, James Agee, and George Orwell are among the writers to whom he applies exacting yet appreciative scrutiny. Even when he more or less trashes John le Carré’s pompous later novels or Norman Mailer’s embarrassing Marilyn, he voices respect for previous achievements and shows no glee over his thumbs-down judgment. James can nail a work’s essence in a phrase (the “garrulous pseudotaciturnity” of Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, for example), but the generosity and perceptiveness of his full-length appraisals are even more impressive. Poetry arouses his particular passion, as vividly demonstrated in the essays on W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin, and he’s just as good on Primo Levi and Mark Twain. Like his idol, Edmund Wilson (subject of another excellent piece), James roams with assurance through world literature past and present, acknowledging no distinctions except those of quality. He couples a democratic belief that art must illuminate common human experience with an unabashed insistence on high standards; though he has written for and about television and does not disdain mass appeal, his assumed audience here is the serious general reader.
Criticism is not indispensable to art,” James writes. “It is indispensable to civilization—a more inclusive thing.” His stimulating and thrilling work forcefully makes a case for that bold declaration.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05180-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
