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NORTHERN LIGHTS

Name: NORTHERN LIGHTS
Author: Deborah Clow
ISBN: 0-679-75542-X

A SELECTION OF NEW WRITING FROM THE AMERICAN WEST

edited by Deborah Clow & Donald Snow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 1994

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As precious as a vein of sapphires in Serendip is this collection of new western writing pulled together by the editors of Northern Lights, the literary review where most of these pieces first appeared. It's usually fairly easy to find a few dogs in a collection such as this, but none too easy here. The 44 essays, poems, and memoirs are arranged to play well with one another and to balance bright and dark, pensive and exuberant. Among the highlights: Jim Harrison (``Nesting in Air'') at his stream-of-consciousness best, meditates upon food and rituals, two items that take up plenty of space in his daily thoughts; Gretel Ehrlich, in a series of correspondences to an architect friend, designs her special house: ``part wild, part human, part beast'' (``Letters to an Architect''); Edward Abbey takes a look at the love/hate relationship Americans have with the cowboy (``Something about Mac, Cows, Poker...''), coming down four-square in the hate camp; and Terry Tempest Williams tells of her membership in ``The Clan of the One-Breasted Women,'' a family riddled with breast cancer. But the real fun is in the mesmerizing new names: Jerry McGahan and his tale of a man's quixotic and prescient, if thwarted, land deal (``Waxwing''); Geoff O'Gara on, again, the rituals of nourishment: a whole different approach than Harrison's, though just as entertaining (``America Eats''); and Ellen Meloy exploring one of the finer points of the vernacular landscape: the drive-in (``Passion Pit''), to mention only three of more than 25 relative unknowns. A remarkable gathering, from which you will emerge shaking your head at the amount of sheer pleasure 400 pages can deliver.

Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-75542-X

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NO MAN'S LAND

THE PLACE OF THE WOMAN WRITER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, VOL. III: LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 1994

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The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White—e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project.

Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994

ISBN: 0-300-05631-1

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STILL MAD
by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar

- BOOK REVIEW
ESSENTIAL ESSAYS
by Adrienne Rich ; edited by Sandra M. Gilbert

- BOOK REVIEW
EATING WORDS
edited by Sandra M. Gilbert ; Roger J. Porter

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WAGNER NIGHTS

AN AMERICAN HISTORY

by Joseph Horowitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

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An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.