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ON WRITING AND POLITICS 1967-1983

Name: ON WRITING AND POLITICS 1967-1983
Author: Günter Grass
ISBN: 0156687933

by Günter Grass ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 1985

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The passions of a social-democrat artist: a baker's dozen essays and speeches voicing Grass's sober, doggedly honest political humanism. As always, Grass gets right down to business. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he tells the Belgrade Writers Conference (1969), "I'm against revolution. . . I detest the sacrifices that always have to be made in its name." Speaking in Athens during the reign of the colonels (1972), he condemns their suppression of democracy, and rehearses his own painful case: At the end of WW II Grass was a 17-year-old Hitler youth, who had just missed being called up, "too young to participate in the crimes of National Socialism, but old enough to have been shaped by their consequences." Belatedly discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, in his native Danzig and elsewhere, he continues to wrestle with his guilt (as in "What Shall We Tell Our Children?"). In this, he attacks the cowardice, the murderous bureaucracy, and demented utopianism of the Nazis and all subsequent dictatorships, right and left, in the First, Second, and Third Worlds. In "Superpower Backyards" (1982) he angrily compares Nicaragua to Poland—though without simply equating the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In "Kafka and His Executors" (1978) he applies Kafka's "vision of totalitarian administration" to the Czechoslovakian regime and Germany, East and West. In "Erfurt 1970 and 1891" (1970) he looks back over the history of socialist revisionism and hails the sanity and decency of the much decried (by Marxists) Eduard Bernstein. Grass seems to have no illusions. In "The Destruction of Mankind Has Begun" (1982) he accepts the grim findings of the Club of Rome reports, and says that he writes, not out of hope, but "because I can't help it." This collection of occasional pieces is a humble, workmanlike affair, of no great stylistic brilliance. But Grass's unblinking intelligence and moral power make it a more than respectable performance.

Pub Date: June 21, 1985

ISBN: 0156687933

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OF ALL THAT ENDS
by Günter Grass ; translated by Breon Mitchell ; illustrated by the author

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM GERMANY TO GERMANY
translated by Günter Grass ; by Krishna Winston

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOX
by Günter Grass

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.