An illuminating voyage into the heart of Frost’s poem and the American spirit.
Unraveling the mystery of a famous poem.
New York Times Book Review poetry columnist Orr (Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, 2011) brings his finely honed skills as a literary critic to a meticulous investigation of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Orr believes has been consistently misread. The poem, he argues, is not “a salute to can-do individualism” or an exhortation to choose an uncommon path in life. Orr presents a fresh, perceptive reading of the verse; places it in the context of Frost’s life, other works, and public persona; and considers the meaning of choice in American culture. Anyone writing about Frost confronts an early biographer’s portrayal of him as a monster: unfeeling, arrogant, and cruel. “Frost is always being rescued, always being reclaimed,” Orr notes. “He’s like a disputed frontier, constantly contested, and this book is yet another stone thrown in that conflict.” Orr sees Frost as neither monster nor angel, nor the modest, “witty, rural sage” that became his public image. “The Road” was inspired by Frost’s dear friend Edward Thomas, who tried Frost’s patience with his “romantic sensibility,” indecisiveness, and “self-dramatizing regret.” Frost meant the poem as a joke, but Thomas—and future generations of readers—failed to understand the humor. Instead, many readers took the poem as underscoring Americans’ “belief in human perfectibility, a concept that assumes the humans in question can make choices that will lead to improvement.” As the poem seems to imply, taking one road rather than another can make “all the difference.” Orr, though, concludes that the poem is a “critique” of the choosing self. “What matters most, the poem suggests, is the dilemma of the crossroads,” a troubling, unsettling intersection; a space, Orr suggests, “for performance and metaphor.”
An illuminating voyage into the heart of Frost’s poem and the American spirit.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-583-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
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
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