Absorbing study of a surprising, multifaceted life.
Biography of a polarizing popularizer of general semantics and one-term senator from California.
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1906–1992), born in Vancouver of aristocratic Japanese parents who returned to Japan when he entered college, never learned Japanese and always thought of himself as North American. He studied and taught English literature in Canada and the United States and aspired to be a modernist poet like one of his heroes, T.S. Eliot. By the time he began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1936, he had affected the manners and speech of an Oxford don, a self-presentation that led others to give him the nickname of Don, which would stick. Hayakawa first made his mark as the author of a manual for students of writing that came to be called Language in Thought and Action, based on the idea of general semantics formulated by Alfred Korzybski, a supposedly scientific means of analyzing the meanings of words. Always restless in mind and ambitious in spirit, Hayakawa used the magazine he founded, ETC., to muse about favorite subjects like jazz, automobile design and civil rights. His early liberalism, which made him suspect in the McCarthy years, yielded to an eccentric conservatism in the ’60s, particularly in his iconic role as acting president at San Francisco State University. Haslam (English Emeritus/Sonoma State Univ.; Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California, 1999, etc.), a student and colleague of his subject’s, admits that while he thought much of the left’s criticism of Hayakawa was unfair, he and the senator drifted apart politically as well as professionally. Nevertheless, the book is a promise kept to Hayakawa’s wife. Haslam (with his own wife as partner) was a good choice for biographer. He clearly admired his subject but is fair (though discreet) about his flaws, including a reputation for philandering.
Absorbing study of a surprising, multifaceted life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3764-3
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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