This reprint of a 1976 UK edition (here published in the US for the first time) demonstrates that a columnist cannot always...
Not yard debris, but more installments (1947–57) of The Irish Times “Full Jug” column by querulous comic provocateur O’Brien (The Poor Mouth, 1974, etc.).
Born Brian Ó Nualláin, Irish civil servant Brian Nolan—for 26 years known to Irish Times readers as Myles nagCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”)—wrote five novels (notably the “sober farce” At Swim-Two-Birds, not reviewed) as Flann O’Brien. Here Myles, the unwilling pub eavesdropper, endures bores (“It’s a disease, you know”) and re-encounters the Brother, who reads and reviews books: “An engrossing story of mankind at handigrips with fate.” Myles also frequents the courts (having smashed a radio station’s recording of the Blue Danube Waltz after listening to 4,312 airings in one year), and he tries to calculate how fat you’d have to be to be seen dead in a field of wheat. Pedantry, faux-profundity, and windy clerics get hoisted skyward, although there are no notes to illumine burning issues now 50 years old. Exercised by architects wheezing about “vocation” (“I wonder at what price this art and sanctity cubes out on the job?”), Myles is quite comfortable tackling diplomacy (“Shake hands and be fiends?”)—for if musicians can descant on politics, why not politicians on consecutive fifths? A ringmaster of Higher Nonsense, Myles attains an apogee of non sequituria in one rhapsody which careens from Dublin theaters to “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” to a magazine psychologist’s warning that “You Can’t Always Card-Index Love!”
This reprint of a 1976 UK edition (here published in the US for the first time) demonstrates that a columnist cannot always be on form. The Best of Myles (1968, not reviewed) might be a better start, but O’Brien is always worth investigation by the converted, the curious, and the endemically lighthearted.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-56478-241-7
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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