by Grace Paley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2000
general instruction by poetic example.
While this volume of Paley’s poetry contains new, unpublished work, it might well be termed a retrospective insofar as it
traces the writer’s poetic career through four previous collections, the first from back in 1985, with poems of even earlier vintage included. Though perhaps better known for her short prose and essays, one compilation of which (The Collected Stories), was a finalist for the 1994 NBA, Paley has gradually expanded her repertoire into verse. Born in the Bronx and educated in New York public schools, she makes use of these influences in a style that is often coarse and gutsy yet always compassionate and frequently leavened with humor. Later poems include wonderfully evocative images of the writer’s adoptive home in rural Vermont. A popular lecturer and workshop leader, Paley has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Dartmouth, and City College, and her involvement in the peace movement and in feminist causes over the past four decades, arising in part from a history of activism in her family, often burbles to the surface. At times, in fact, we’re fairly inundated by it, as when she enumerates rocket, bomb, and napalm attacks on a Vietnamese village in a bludgeoning manner few poets of the time managed to avoid. She’s in top form, however, when she sets aside the intellectual polemics and observes quietly. In one poem she describes a Vietnamese child speaking to his father who, unhearing, remains engrossed in the mosaic of three ships on the wall of a Brooklyn subway station. The few examples of Paley’s didacticism on behalf of the causes she espouses may be overlooked in favor of her more
general instruction by poetic example.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-12642-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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by Grace Paley ; edited by Kevin Bowen & Nora Paley
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by Grace Paley
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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