"Today I am out for another grand obsessional walk. I and myself firmly clued, together. "—A perennial on bookstalls along the Seine for the past 25 years, Black Spring is one of the few books you could read on your deathbed for a sure last laugh. It's an autobiography about Brooklyn (circa 1915 or so) and Paris in the Thirties. It is also a very great book, in a way that the two Tropics never quite are. No one, including Thomas Wolfe, has ever described Brooklyn with the gusto Miller lavishes upon every storefront and shifty citizen. His depiction of a tailor shop he worked in has more wriggling life crammed into fifty pages than most writers get into five hundred. Here, too, is a panoramic ode to the human bladder that would make Whitman kick his kitchen table with envy. Always right, Black Spring's first 147 pages are probably the best Miller ever wrote, with little gratuitous sex but enough adrenalin for a horserace. The book falls down grotesquely during the last hundred pages, going off into murky surrealism, disordered Bosch-like imaginings and a general somnambulism common to vampire movies. But even encumbered with this, Miller's autobiography is superior self-revelation, in a bloomy-minded prose of matchless vigor. Maybe it's not for everybody, but if you like it wildly. One opinion: Imperishable.
Pub Date: April 4, 1963
ISBN: 0802131824
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1963
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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