A strong gathering of literary essays from a leading American critic and public intellectual. In her fourth collection of essays (after Bartleby in Manhattan, 1983, etc.)—all of which have been previously published in the New York Review of Books and other such venues—Hardwick trains her gaze on American writers and books. Among the categories of inclusion are “Old New York” (Edith Wharton and Henry James); “Americans Abroad” (Gertrude Stein, Margaret Fuller, Djuna Barnes); and “Fictions of America” (Richard Ford, Philip Roth, John Cheever, John Updike, and Joan Didion); and Hardwick rounds out her collection with an uncategorizable critique of televangelists from the South. Her particular strength, though, lies in the literary. She has known personally many of these writers, both living and dead. This may explain why one senses special pleading in a few cases. Her essays on John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford are deeply perceptive and beautifully written, but when it comes to Joan Didion, Hardwick seems to be making the best of a bad situation. Her insights are in this instance less compelling, perhaps because she can’t quite persuade herself or her reader that Didion’s novels hold up under the severest scrutiny. Hardwick’s particular strength is her casual-sounding yet deadly accurate language. In her essay on Elizabeth Bishop she writes: “Nothing is more striking to me than the casual prose of poets, with its quick and dashing informality, its mastery of the sudden and offhand, the free and thrown away.” This gracefully iambic passage describes (and embodies) one of the many virtues of her own prose, and it explains why reading her is such a pleasure. And, finally, anyone who doesn—t yet know what a weird national phenomenon Vachel Lindsay was should read that essay first. Taken together, these essays constitute a vivid reflection of American literary culture in the imagination of one of our most urbane critics.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50127-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
