For all the skewering, this is a well-researched, passionate tribute to books and authors that have left their marks.
A subversive lampoon of the Western literary canon.
Culture writer and creator of the parody Twitter account @guyinyourmfa, Schwartz (Choose Your Own Disaster, 2018, etc.) distills 500 years of literary history through the eyes of a fictional know-it-all. This entertaining guide starts with Shakespeare and winds through Goethe, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and fiction’s heavy hitters, culminating with the Jonathans (Franzen, Safran Foer, and Lethem). Each profile summarizes a particular author’s biographical highlights and major works. Amid factual details, the MFA student inserts revealing asides and footnotes. Off-track forays, from how to roll cigarettes to how to pen dirtier love notes à la Joyce, build a road map for emulating the ultimate writer. Pointed descriptions home in on the features that have stained some of the authors' reputations. Failed marriages, self-absorption, Updike’s infamous Rabbit character, and uglier histories—such as Mailer’s violence—portray a flawed bunch. Comedy writer and cartoonist Katzenstein creates expressive, grayscale headshots with sartorial flair. Ranging from brow-heavy seriousness to closed-mouth smiles, the authors’ faces are humorously annotated. (Of Kafka: “Auteur hair.” Henry James: “Eye bags—genius never sleeps.” Kerouac: “Perfect swoop.”) Each is given a yearbook hall-of-fame title, such as Milton, a “Goody Two-Shoes,” Fitzgerald, who’s crowned “Prom King,” and Vonnegut, “Most Dependable.” Such offhand remarks are clever rather than blistering. Fittingly, the MFA student is blind to his fawning taste. The role demands a misogynist who pretends to be “woke” and who considers New York as the only literary hub worth mentioning. Schwartz's knowingness and thorough commitment are consistently humorous. She writes the MFA guy with sincere, cringing acuity, and the act stays fresh. An affectionate naiveté offsets his ambition, and the literary overview is useful. A reading list rounds out the compendium, a fun read for the aspiring literati.
For all the skewering, this is a well-researched, passionate tribute to books and authors that have left their marks.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286787-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
A ho-hum digest of 100 Bill of Rights cases decided by justices Brennan and Rehnquist along predictable ideological lines. ``This is not an insider's account,'' warns Irons (Political Science/Univ. of California, San Diego; The Courage of Their Convictions, 1988, etc.) in his preface. ``I did not interview either justice for this book. Neither have I talked with former clerks or looked at private papers.'' Bad move. Had Irons provided some behind-the-robes analysis, this book might have had drama. (Irons himself acknowledges Brennan's legendary ability to use his charm to win votes in controversial cases.) And had he focused on far fewer cases—say, ten—his analysis might have had some depth. Instead, this numbing case-by-case-by-case summary provides little insight into the jurisprudence of the men who, for 18 years, were the Court's leading voices on the left and right—and even less insight into their personalities. After a perfunctory stab at characterizing each justice in a chapter-long biography, Irons proceeds to march through the Bill of Rights, offering an overly dense historical context for each amendment and then quoting from Brennan's opinion, on the one hand, and Rehnquist's on the other. Most of the big constitutional issues of the post-Warren Court are here—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, the right to die, school prayer. But all Irons offers is the revelation that Brennan consistently votes for individual litigants against the government, and uses the word ``dignity'' in his opinions a lot, while Rehnquist sides with state legislatures and the police, and relies on the word ``deference.'' (Fans of Rehnquist will chafe at the frequent snide comments about his proclivities for ignoring precedent and distorting evidence—but it's unlikely that this tedious book will generate much heat on the subject.) Plodding he-said/he-said treatment that makes for strenuous cover-to-cover reading.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42436-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A prominent neurophysiologist explains his theories about the brain's chemistry and how it affects our conscious (and unconscious) activities. Hobson (Psychiatry/Harvard) espouses a kind of yin-yang view of the brain in which waking states are dominated by ``amines'' (neurotransmitters like norepinephrine that are associated with attention and arousal) and sleeping and vegetative states by acetylcholine. In this hydrodynamic theory amines are depleted as the day wears on and the cholinergic levels rise, precipitating sleep and dreaming—a time when acetylcholine is at its peak. During sleep the system is building up its supply of amines, eventually waking us up. Not altogether a surprising theory, considering that Hobson's first book, The Dreaming Brain and Sleep (not reviewed), reflected similarly his lifelong research into sleep, collection of dream journals, and experiments with lucid (i.e., self-conscious) dreaming. While the notion that we are ruled by our neurochemistry will hardly shock enlightened readers, the tendency in approaches like Hobson's is to overinterpret: Thus the schizophrenic's hallucinations, the fits of expletive-slinging common in Tourette's patients, and the suggestibility of hypnotizable people are all given as examples of involuntary loss of control occurring in waking states (whereas dream sleep creates controls that prevent violent acting out). Curiously, with all the explanatory weight Hobson puts on the importance of sleep and dreaming, he is the first to admit that no one can explain the necessity of dreams; he even suggests that newer drugs that promote production of amines may obviate the need for dreaming. There is obviously more to brain-mind states, more to the bag of neurochemicals and byways of neural circuitry, than Hobson can account for. All the same, his case studies, autobiographical anecdotes, and guidance on how to deal with sleep problems without drugs will intrigue many readers and possibly provide relief to others.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-36754-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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