Overall, a vital contribution to modern poetics.
A rich smattering of essays on American poets from one of this country’s most important critics.
Topics in this latest collection by Bromwich (Disowned by Memory, 1998, etc.) range from studied close readings of great and lesser-known works by Stevens, Moore, Ashbery, and other well-known figures to provocative discussions of the aesthetics of modern poetry and the morality of taste. The essays themselves date from the mid-1970s to the present, and it’s interesting to chart the author’s critical tack across that period—especially as he self-consciously checks his maleness at the door when interpreting the work of Bishop and Moore in 1990. Bromwich is a master of drawing lines between artists (seen here most clearly in his essay on Crane and Eliot) and amplifying poetic resonances: of seminal interest to Stevens scholars is his exploration of the shift in Stevens’s pragmatism from Nietzsche to William James. For students of modernism, the author’s smart claim that the most compelling aspect of modernist aesthetics arises from what he terms a “rhetoric of understatement” should open countless doors for further poetic inquiry. But of most general appeal in this eclectic mix of refined literary thought are the author’s notions of the function of the critic. In various spots, he argues that a good critic “need never do more than point,” and point Bromwich does, with remarkable precision and lucidity. His sentences are lithe and supple, although one wishes he’d occasionally remove his gloves and let the passion driving his scholarship through; even the recounting of an incident involving his son (an experience that in part fuels the charged question of how moral is taste) is handled with uncanny reserve. It seems that Bromwich’s prose at times succumbs to the lure of understatement he so rightly identifies in his subjects.
Overall, a vital contribution to modern poetics.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-226-07560-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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