by Harold Bloom ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 1963
William Blake was the messiah of the imagination; in poem after poem he reached the everlasting gospel of the intellect and will; a once-in-a-lifetime "original", he lived and died virtually unknown, unhonored. Since the 20th century, however, he's become the grand prix of the illuminati, a legendary figure whose message to mankind is full of, for some, visionary greatness, for others, mystical gibberish. Sarold Bloom, one of Yale's up-and-coming faculty men, clearly belongs with the rooters, and his critique, an elaborate, eminently enthusiastic examination of all the verse, but most especially Milton, Jerusalem and The Four Zoas, should prove a sell-out with Blake scholars and fans. According to Bloom, Blake was insistently apocalyptic rather than biblically prophetic; his tapestry melded the symbolic lands of Beulah and Eden, the transformation of Innocence and Experience, the fall and resurrection of Man, the union of Good and Evil, those creative Contraries. As the forerunner of phenomenological psychology he synthesized the haunted state of lost mythic connections between man and nature, man and himself. Blake's debt to Boehme, Swednborg and Neoplatonism is noted, as is the author's to Northrope Frye, among others. A complex, challenging commentary.
Pub Date: March 8, 1963
ISBN: 0801490987
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
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
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