Next book

THE UNCOLLECTED CRITICAL WRITINGS

Cleaning out the Wharton attic, Wegener (Literature/Baruch Coll.) has assembled a jumble sale of her nonfiction, with a few notable finds amid the lumber. Wharton's slim, impressionistic study The Writing of Fiction was her only critical work published as a book during her lifetime, but Wegener's selection demonstrates that Wharton wrote nonfiction throughout her career. Her early, fairly conventional journalism consists mainly of book reviews of ephemeral poetry, genteel critical studies, and historical novels, with at best a biography of George Eliot to brighten things. Two essays, however, stand out. ``The Vice of Reading'' castigates the idea that reading is a duty, a humorless and necessary exercise in development, rather than an imaginative skill (``To read is not a virtue; but to read well is an art''). ``The Criticism of Fiction'' won Henry James's admiration for upholding French formalism in the novel over the looser Anglo-American tradition. But even in her chummy review of James's Letters, she mixes a warm portrait of the Master with a keen treatment of his famous style. Wharton's introductions to later editions of her own works give a personal perspective on aesthetics, especially on her intentions in the novel Ethan Frome. Unfortunately, the introductions Wharton wrote for her friends' negligible books, whether historical novels, gardening guides, or travel writing, are slack by comparison. Likewise, Wharton's fond tributes eulogizing eminent but now forgotten New Yorkers are unremarkable. Her most touching eulogy, however, is for Gilded Age Manhattan, in the piece ``A Little Girl's New York.'' Two later critical essays, on the vicissitudes of literary tastes and on the nature of literary realism are relaxed and persuasive. Some of these pieces admirably display Wharton's high cultural standards, incisive critical eye, and conservative literary tastes, but many are works only the most devoted Whartonian would need to read.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-691-04349-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996

Categories:
Next book

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

Categories:
Next book

IN MY PLACE

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

Close Quickview