Nothing is as wonderful as a trip to la ville lumière, but this is a good second choice.
The bestselling author turns her hand to travel writing in an episodic, engaging evocation of Paris.
Johnson (L’Affaire, 2003, etc.) offers an intimate look at St.-Germain-des-Prés, the Parisian quartier she has lived in for years, but don’t come to this book expecting a sustained narrative. Instead, Johnson presents short mediations delightfully reminiscent of Colette. She begins at 8 Rue Bonaparte in her apartment overflowing with books and visitors. From there, the writer leads us on a colorful tour: up a staircase behind her guest room that leads to a spot where Jews were hidden during WWII; into the chapel near her apartment; through the famed art and architecture academy, École des Beaux-Arts; to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, where Johnson does much of her writing. Along the way, we inspect French fashion and taste French macaroons—“not those coconut-almond cookies we think of,” Johnson explains, “but a sort of pastel-colored oreo, two halves of pastry with a filling in between . . . pistachio, caramel, chocolate, fraises . . . or even chili, or oyster.” She takes us to the Paris of the past: we meet Queen Margot, Marguerite de Navarre (1553–1615), “in some ways the founder of the neighborhood,” and Dr. Guillotin, who in the cour de Commerce St.-André, “experimented on sheep to perfect his instrument.” The sections on 20th-century Parisian history include nods to existentialism, Edith Wharton, and a community of expat lesbians who congregated at Rue Jacob in the 1920s. In her evocation of and an ode to a different culture, Johnson waxes rhapsodic of the joys on walking, extolling the “village quality” of St.-Germain and the pleasure of running into friends and neighbors. Indeed, a subtle critique of contemporary America lurks at the edges of her portrait of Paris.
Nothing is as wonderful as a trip to la ville lumière, but this is a good second choice.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7922-7266-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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