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
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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