This judicious gathering is a fine place to sample Hardwick’s work.
More essays from a master of the form.
Hardwick’s essays have been getting a new look thanks to Cathy Curtis’ recent bio, A Splendid Intelligence, so editor Andriesse’s collection of 35 previously uncollected essays—published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, and other publications—is well timed. In the first piece, Hardwick writes that a “collection of essays is a collection of variations,” and these pieces showcase her own range of interests and what Andriesse calls “the poise of her prose.” In the first section, “Places, People, Things,” Hardwick begins with personal reminiscences, writing about her beloved, “graceful” hometown, Lexington, Kentucky, and Maine, one of her favorite summer spots, which always “takes me by surprise.” Then there are profiles, of Balanchine, friends Susan Sontag (“all ideas”) and the “greatly gifted” Katherine Anne Porter, and Faye Dunaway. The section titled “Piety and Politics” shows Hardwick taking on current affairs, including incisive discussions of elections, scandals, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Kennedys, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton (“shallow, reckless”). Particularly scathing is “On Behalf of the Unborn: A Celibacy Amendment,” a brief 1996 essay on Republican politics and abortion. As Andriesse writes, the writing in the section “Feminine Principle” shows that for Hardwick, “if liberation was a sign of social progress, it was also, frequently, a source of personal pain.” In 1971, she looked “at little girls with wonder and with anxiety. I do not know whether they will be free—the only certainty is that many will be adrift.” In “On Reading the Writings of Women,” Hardwick confesses to a “nearly unaccountable attraction and hostility to the work of other women writers,” and she goes on to berate and praise a few. An essay on Southern literature is a tour de force of breadth, economy, and insight. In the miscellaneous “Musings” section, the author’s examination of Leonardo da Vinci thoroughly captivates, while “Grits Soufflé” enchants.
This judicious gathering is a fine place to sample Hardwick’s work.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68137-623-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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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 intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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