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A WINDOW ON RUSSIA

FOR THE USE OF FOREIGN READERS

The glory of the late Edmund Wilson, as Frank Kermode remarked, has always been "his ability to identify, even if he could not completely describe, the master-spirit of an age." Other critics are more analytic or more systematic, but none quite match Wilson's grasp of culture and history, of movements and men. In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls "a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors," we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow. True, the essays are uneven, the earlier surveys of Gogol and Chekhov, for instance, are slight affairs, without the range and poignancy of Wilson's studies of Turgenev and Tolstoy and Pushkin. True, he is no phrasemaker. He tells us that "Gorky rightly said that Tolstoy and God were like two bears in one den," and there is nothing in his own remarks on Tolstoy that equals the pithiness of Gorky's remark. Yet how memorably Wilson builds up a character, an era; how fascinating are his fussy data and leisurely summaries; how easily he makes his points: the bureaucrats who flourish under the Soviets as they did under the Tsars, the peasants who suffer from one regime to another, the melancholy authors who universally despair of Russia yet cannot bear to be parted from her. Included in the current miscellany is the famous controversy between Nabokov and Wilson over Evgeni Onegin, which first appeared in The New York Review, and two really splendid chapters on Svetlana and Solzhenitsyn which appeared in The New Yorker.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 1972

ISBN: 0374511411

Page Count: 294

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1972

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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NUTCRACKER

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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