An autodidact's breezy digest of the historical and personal importance of the book, with few intellectual pretensions and only a couple of political and cultural ones. Burns's career began in television, first as a news reporter, then as a media critic, and finally as a dissenter with his first book, Broadcast Blues (1993). For his defense of the book and the pleasure of reading, Burns artfully employs his genial style, which is as easily read as delivered on TV, despite occasional slips from chattiness into sarcasm. In print, he has the advantage of embellishing his cribs from the Durants' Story of Civilization, Daniel Boorstin's The Americans, and Neil Postman's techno-cultural criticism with amusing anecdotes and remarks from the likes of H.L. Mencken, Goethe, and others. Burns follows up a whirlwind history of writing, printing, and bookmaking (encompassing the library of Alexandria under Ptolemy and monastic scribes of the Middle Ages) with an even broader one of censorship from Protagoras and Milton to Joseph McCarthy and contemporary school boards. In the latter case, the brief accounts of Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice and the genteel censor Thomas Bowdler are matched with contemporary incidents such as attacks on Huckleberry Finn and Burns's own vivid experience of a small-town book burning, which he filmed for television. These historical and contemporary parallels have more force than the author's second-hand diatribes against slipping educational standards and the epistemological evils of deconstruction. Still, he optimistically if sentimentally frames all this with his and his son's mutual childhood enjoyment of Peter Pan. In this switch in medium from the box to the book, Burns has a more or less effective forum for his pop critiques.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-87975-004-5
Page Count: 172
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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