This mean-spirited recounting of the life of the expatriate American filmmaker gives a new meaning to the term ``critical biography.'' As profiled by Caute, a prolific author with a specialty in the history of the political left (Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades, 1988, etc.), filmmaker Joseph Losey emerges as a domineering, womanizing sourpuss, a humorless, often dour man with a certain visual flair and a knack for alienating longtime friends. Caute traces Losey's career in a needlessly complicated structure of flash-forwards and flashbacks, beginning with the 1963 triumph of The Servant, his first collaboration with screenwriter Harold Pinter. He then moves back to Losey's childhood in Wisconsin (Losey was one of a trio of great filmmakers from that state who emerged in Hollywood in the '40s, the others being Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray), his years at Dartmouth, his budding radicalism, his stage work in the '30s, and onward to his Hollywood work. Losey was blacklisted because of his Communist affiliations and left the US to avoid a subpoena, continuing his career in England, Italy, and eventually France. Caute follows his growing reputation as a ``European'' filmmaker, his long collaborations with Pinter, Dirk Bogarde, and cinematographer Gerry Fisher. He describes each of Losey's films in detail but seems neither engaged with nor interested in them. The book is a stifling compilation of minutiae, and Caute never lets a statement by his subject go unchallenged. But why should recollections by Losey's sister or by his collaborators be more reliable than Losey's own? The book's elaborately nonchronological structure renders Losey's development as an artist all but opaque, and Caute's literal-minded readings of the films, filled with quibbles about plausibility and faithfulness to details of British class structure, reveal his blindness to the films' own universes. An encyclopedic catalog of Losey's shortcomings and sins, unleavened by any sense of historical context, artistic development, or even sympathy for his work.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-506410-0
Page Count: 591
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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