Though it doesn’t live up to its influences, this collection loves the form and offers plenty of wit and humorous...
A compilation of laconic, pithy sayings meant partly to guide daily life and partly as a tribute to the rich tradition of literary aphorisms.
In an era of 140-character tweets, Wick (The Devil's Tale, 2006) revisits Twitter’s intellectual predecessor—the epigram, and its close sibling, the aphorism—in a series of sometimes surprising, often thought-provoking, but always brief satirical statements and philosophies for everyday living. With an obvious enthusiasm for language and its history, the author introduces the quasi-restrictive form and its notable fans and pioneers, from the ancient Greeks to William Shakespeare to Samuel Johnson, even proposing that Jesus Christ’s most famous quotations had in them the spirit of epigrams, combining observations and wit to subvert and challenge conventional thinking. In this vein, Wick presents his own aphorisms, encouraging readers to take them at their leisure and in no particular order. The bits share no overarching theme, though they revisit several subjects, railing against vague social and moral restrictions and offering some commentary on the way society engages with faith and religion. All are offered without context (as all good aphorisms should be), but the collection has a derisive tone that appears early and obviously—“If you see a blind beggar kick him. Why should you be kinder than God?”—and saturates the work. However, though cynical, none of the entries fall back on the ease of sarcasm, always shooting for insight or irreverence, sometimes achieving both. And while aphorisms and epigrams often aim to promote different ways of thinking, entertainment seems to be the book’s primary goal, as it regularly goes for easy laughs with simple puns and malapropisms and boasts comical “reviewer comments” on the cover from figures such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Apollonius of Tyana. The use of such names is no accident, of course, since the text knows its influences and pays respect to each.
Though it doesn’t live up to its influences, this collection loves the form and offers plenty of wit and humorous observations.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484051719
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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