Though not really much more than a commonplace book of the author’s personal fascinations, many readers will dip into this...
Bestselling novelist Godwin (Evensong, 1999, etc.) stitches an intimate sampler of the ways we humans have imagined acts of the heart through time and across cultures.
The heart works in strange and curious ways—“heart acts are often improvisational detours from point-to-point plans”—Godwin observes, but she is most interested in a kind of heart-knowledge “based on feeling values, relationship, personal courage, intimations of the ineffable, a passion for transcendence.” The author focuses here on a selection of cultural heart acts that have moved her and made her more alive, more worthy, from the prehistoric cave painter who gave life to a wooly mammoth by adding a heart to the epic of Gilgamesh, “the story of one human heart living fully in its time, finally conceding its human limits.” She examines the Hebrew heart that feels shame when it deviates from walking with God and St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which “the heart is pure protean marvel.” She deplores the horrible theft of the heart’s poetic associations by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of empiricism, which see the individual human as “a cog in the almighty economic machine.” Godwin takes light-footed tours through such literary themes as heartbreak, heartlessness, change of heart, and the heart of darkness: the “journey into a darkness that might poison or dry up this precious wellspring—or deepen and enlarge it if you come through.” She lauds the hospitality of the heart, “a special kind of imagination that concentrates on how another creature might be feeling,” one of those essential rhythms to which the caring heart is tuned. She also provides numerous personal stories to give her survey an anecdotal warmth and clarity.
Though not really much more than a commonplace book of the author’s personal fascinations, many readers will dip into this appealing grab-bag with pleasure and sometimes surprise.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-97795-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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