A major biography that redeems Plath from the condescension of easy interpretation.
A sober and detailed critical biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most misunderstood poets.
The story of Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) life is inseparable from her tragic death: She committed suicide in London at 30, leaving behind a body of poetry and fiction often shaped by depression, rage, and heartbreak. Even so, Clark, a longtime Plath scholar, is determined to extricate the poet from the prison of a reputation as a “witchy death-goddess” and reframe her as a serious, wide-ranging artist with prodigious expressive powers. “Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so,” writes Clark. To make her case, the author meticulously explores Plath’s omnivorous literary interests and busy social life; she was a creative writer who craved liberation as well as a high-achieving Smith College student and prim Mademoiselle magazine intern who sought solace in conformity. Her warring urges took a toll early: In 1953, following a harrowing round of electroshock therapy, she attempted suicide, an experience repurposed for her novel The Bell Jar. Yet her conflicts also motivated her; a whirlwind marriage to the British poet Ted Hughes stoked her iconoclasm while also providing entry into the boys club of literary Britain. Clark claims better and deeper access to Plath’s unpublished writings (particularly related to Hughes) than prior biographers, and if that sometimes means she is persnickety about Plath’s day-by-day (if not hour-by-hour) activities, the approach avoids sloppy armchair psychoanalysis. The author’s attention to specifics serves her very well in the closing pages, as she tracks how Plath’s depression, anxiety over her literary standing, despair over her failed marriage, and fear of institutionalization speeded her death even while those same forces inspired indelible, harrowing late poems like “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Edge.”
A major biography that redeems Plath from the condescension of easy interpretation.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-307-96116-7
Page Count: 1152
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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