Feels like more like a padded magazine article than a labor of passion.
Journalist Lewine debuts in time-honored Hemingway fashion with a blow-by-blow look at the classical art of the bullfighter.
Refreshingly, Lewine is not out to bash the literary lion who so famously tread the corrida de toros before him. Instead, he seeks to emulate Hemingway with such faintly familiar descriptions as this one of his story’s matador hero: “Fran was 28 years old and as good-looking as any man had a right to be.” During recent bullfighting season stretching from March to September, Lewine accompanied the traveling cuadrilla (entourage) of reigning matador Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. Fran’s several forebears starred in The Sun Also Rises and The Dangerous Summer; his father died a national hero after a sensational goring in 1984. Once a “phenom,” the fighter has just separated from his wife and is still recovering from distractions that often plague the celebrity matadors, always eager to please a fickle public intent on the next young hero. Embarking with his company on a punishing road trip via minivan crisscrossing Spain, Fran performs respectably, even triumphantly in dozens of ferias (civil festivals), gaining ears and losing ears as he tries to reestablish his waning reputation. Lewine trots along in his glamorous wake, explaining in laymen’s terms the finer points of this 18th-century bloodletting ritual. Bullfighting is more art than sport, the author reminds us, since a sport contains the suspense of not knowing who will win, and the bull never wins. Lewine examines the three qualities a good matador must display—parar (to stop), mandar (to command) and templar (to avoid extremes)—and discourses on the elegant maneuvers of the muleta cape. He visits a bull-breeding ranch in Seville, introduces the peons involved in a cuadrilla and offers plenty of unflinching ringside action. His prose is workmanlike and restrained, but seldom enthralling.
Feels like more like a padded magazine article than a labor of passion.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-26325-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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
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
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