Authoritative introductions contribute to the literary significance of the diaries.
A candid self-portrait of the “bad girl of American letters.”
Biographer Epstein offers a judicious edition of the diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), beginning in 1907, when the ebullient teenager felt sometimes overwhelmed with caring for her two younger sisters whenever her mother, a nurse, was called away. “It is very hard to be sixteen,” she confides to her diary, glad to have an outlet for what she calls her “spite.” At 19, fantasizing about a “beloved,” she pours her passion into “Renascence,” which she entered into a poetry contest in May 1912. Accepted for a volume of the winners, “Renascence” was singled out for praise by several reviewers and served to launch Millay’s career. The Poetry Society of America hosted a literary evening in her honor in 1913, when she was a student at Barnard, preparing to enter college. For the 20-year-old poet, New York City was a heady experience, and her diary reflects the excitement of meeting other poets (Sara Teasdale, for one), shopping, walking through Manhattan, and seeing her first opera, Madame Butterfly, at the Metropolitan Opera House. After graduating from Vassar, she traveled to Europe, including Albania, which had just opened to Western tourism. Her vivid entries from that trip, Epstein notes, appear here for the first time. In 1923, Millay married the wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Boissevain, widower of suffragist Inez Milholland, and soon the couple bought Steepletop, a house in Austerlitz, New York, where Millay lived for the rest of her life. Entries reveal her as impetuous, hardworking, and passionate; friends could irritate as much as please. A lover’s rejection sent her into a depression from which she never recovered. By 1949, when she made her last entry, she had become “a solitary, tragic figure,” suffering from ill health, addiction to alcohol and opiates, and loneliness.
Authoritative introductions contribute to the literary significance of the diaries.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-24568-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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