Academic yet accessible, with special appeal to avid readers of classic lit.
A history of the 20th-century novel that examines, contextualizes, and draws connections among work by more than 30 authors.
Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, presents his essays in three parts, chronologically ordered. The text, he notes, is a working example of “descriptive criticism, as practiced by such critics as Clement Greenberg, Randall Jarrell, Pauline Kael, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Greil Marcus.” Following a preface about Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), which “resembles nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass,” the first section encompasses works from the last few decades of the 1900s through the end of World War I, including titles by Wells, Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, whose book The Magic Mountain (1924) Frank deems “a new form of the twentieth-century novel, a form born of the war whose new significance could only be fully appreciated after the war.” The middle, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, covers a “period of astonishing invention.” In the final section, the author examines the novels of the mid- to late 1900s, from Things Fall Apart to One Hundred Years of Solitude and beyond. Frank is a dogged enthusiast whose optimism almost always wins out, often for reasons related to positive emotions. Writing about Kafka’s Amerika, for example, he comments, “The book is one ongoing disaster, yet much of it is oddly cheery in tone.” Frank’s curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy, despite some repetition—e.g., “Kipling was a restless man”; “Thomas Mann…is a restless man”; D.H. Lawrence was the “most restless of writers.” The most controversial thing about this book may be the appeal that it makes for its own existence. While it may strike some as gratuitous, devoted literature fans of canonical literature will relish it.
Academic yet accessible, with special appeal to avid readers of classic lit.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374270964
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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