This book will create keen interest because it is the last-and-posthumous-work of Gertrude Stein. A brilliant introduction by Thornton Wilder who accomplishes the difficult feat of making clear what Miss Stein was laboring to express in her foggy and repetitious style, and to show that her aims were both extremely definite and interesting. In Four in America, she takes her favorite Americans,- Ulysses S. Grant, Wilbur Wright, George Washington, Henry James- and recreates them as if they had been a religious leader, a painter, a novelist, a military general, respectively. At first view the plan seems to furnish little more than-as Wilder says- a "parlor game". "One soon discovers a very earnest indeed. It asks about how creativity work in anyone, about the relations between personality and gifts, personality and genius. It asks another question: what is an American and what makes him different from citizen of any other country"...An important book because Miss Stein is an important figure in our literary scene. Important also because Wilder's introduction is one of the finest pieces of literary criticism, to be written in our decade. There's a Stein clique.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1947
ISBN: 0836913817
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1947
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
Did you like this book?
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
