A captivating collection.
Adroit essays from the two-time Man Booker Prize–winning novelist.
From the late 1980s, Mantel has contributed reviews, essays, and memoirs to the London Review of Books on topics that range from Madonna to Robespierre, from playwright John Osborne’s “ferociously sulky” memoir to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and including a hefty dose of the Tudors. Interspersed with the essays are ephemera: brief letters to the journal’s doting editors, especially Mary-Kay Wilmers, to whom Mantel once confessed having “critic’s block”; postcards, emails (her own email address is redacted); and covers of the LRB that announce her contributions. The collection, then, serves as much as a display of Mantel’s shrewd eye and stylish prose as a testimony to her long, fruitful association with the LRB. Her reviews are capacious, erudite, well informed, and exacting. “To accept an untruth, to assent to a lazy version of history, is not just negligent but immoral,” she writes in praise of Charles Nicoll’s book on the death of Christopher Marlowe. Likewise, she sees in historian John Demos’ work about a woman taken captive by Mohawks “an exercise in scrupulous scholarship and imaginative sympathy.” Admitting a “penchant for regicides,” malice, and a bit of gore, Mantel has been drawn to books on the doomed and the damned: Marie Antoinette, Jane Boleyn, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Helen Duncan, a woman condemned for witchcraft in Britain in 1944. Besides being a revelatory examination of class, desire, and the phenomenon of spiritualism, Malcolm Gaskill’s book on Duncan, Mantel writes, “is also in a wider sense an inquiry into ‘how we know the things we know’ and how what we can know or choose to know is circumscribed by our culture.” That inquiry, of course, underlays her own forays into the past, including her memories: first meeting her stepfather, living in Saudi Arabia for several years, and suffering hallucinations after protracted recovery from surgery.
A captivating collection.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-00-842997-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
