by Eric Miles Williamson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
What the critic sees as brutal honesty too often seems unhinged and even irrelevant.
There’s some guilty pleasure for readers in these transgressive literary responses, but most of this collection reads more like blowhard venting than thoughtful criticism.
Titled after a column Williamson (Oakland, Jack London, and Me, 2008) wrote for a French magazine, where his brand of outlaw discourse has found favor, this Texas-based novelist-professor offers knee-jerk response rather than reasoned analysis. He inhabits a literary universe of verities that can occasionally sound more like prejudice: Female novelists hate men (except for the sainted Marilynne Robinson, “America’s Quiet Genius," whom Williamson embraces in part because he says female readers don’t like her.) Black novelists hate whites. Obscure is better than renowned (or popular). Small presses are better than large publishing houses. The South is better than the Northeast. Poor is better than middle class. Streetwise experience is better than pointy-headed intellectualism (though the author makes much of his multiple postgraduate degrees and his academic tenure, often with more revulsion than pride). Williamson either loves or hates, with little to no middle ground, though he writes that an author can move from one extreme to another by violating the verities. Thus, the once-obscure Cormac McCarthy (“the greatest fiction writer alive, bar none”) becomes “a dried-up, sentimental has-been” with his introduction to the viewership of Oprah. Many of the titles of these essays, some of them little more than book reviews that summarize plot, tell readers all they need to know (“Because He Has Wasted My Time, I’d Like to Bitch-Slap F. Scott Fitzgerald and Take His Lunch Money”; “Nathan Zuckerman Goes Pee-Pee in His Pants and We’re Supposed to Care: Or, Zuckerman Unzipped”).
What the critic sees as brutal honesty too often seems unhinged and even irrelevant.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-933896-38-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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