Intriguing and thoughtful work from a doctor and thinker as comfortable quoting Longfellow as discussing Charcot’s cases at...
Pathologist-turned-author González-Crussi (On Being Born, 2004, etc.) produces another astute series of essays on human mortality and the function of art, this time concerning the sense of sight.
He begins his study with an exploration of “men’s foremost visual taboo,” tracing through history the complex male reaction to a glimpse of female genitalia: “allurement . . . commingled with the horrid fascination of death.” González-Crussi displays here a characteristic breadth of reading that spans recondite archives and modern-day newspaper reports. In “The Body as Will and Representation,” the author observes that the desire to see the body inside and out leads to such disparate phenomena as the medical art of dissection and 19th-century Parisians’ morbid delight in visiting the morgue, where cadavers were displayed to public view and onlookers could confront “the material embodiment of the Great Leveling that shall take place one day.” “Seeing Is Believing, and Believing Is Seeing” moves from “last sights” (the religious images 16th-century priests held before the gaze of prisoners about to be executed) to inquiries into what exactly passes before the eyes of those on the verge of death, speculating that they may be looking at “the supreme mystery that lies, beckoning us all, in the infinite distance.” “More Power to the Gaze” recounts ancient Mesopotamian and Greek theories about how the eyes derive their puissance—by sending out rays of inner “fire” toward an object, the Pythagoreans believed. In “Spectacular Vision: Three Ways of Looking at the Mirror,” González-Crussi offers examples of artists’ fascination with reflected personality and duplication, from medieval painters to such 19th-century writers as Poe and Dostoevsky. A final essay, “The Clinical Eye,” explores the extension of the medical gaze, from psychoanalysis to microscopy.
Intriguing and thoughtful work from a doctor and thinker as comfortable quoting Longfellow as discussing Charcot’s cases at Salpêtrière.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-58567-674-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
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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