Journalist Merrill (The Blues Route, 1990) records the early days of erstwhile publishing phenom Esquire magazine. Esky, the pop-eyed, mustachioed personification of the periodical, is now mature enough to join AARP and start collecting Social Security, but in his youth he was quite the rakish one. As Merrill tells it, Esquire was launched in 1933 as a journal to sell haberdashery, whiskey, and other gents' furnishings, and it was an instant hit. Its recipe—a mix of equal parts social and sartorial usage, big-name authors and burlesque bawdy—was formulated by owner and publisher David Smart, a Chicago slicker (and publisher of menswear catalogs, including Gentleman's Quarterly) and founding editor Arnold Gingrich. Producing a sort of Police Gazette with snob appeal, Gingrich snared the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, all on the cheap. He placed them cheek by jowl, so to speak, first with the streamlined, airbrushed Petty Girl and then with the even more popular Varga Girl, both prototypical images of impossibly leggy Barbies for Men. RisquÇ cartoons abounded. The formula was unbeatable—so much so that the postal authorities took umbrage and revoked the magazine's mailing privileges. It took the Supreme Court to free the Varga Girl. Merrill tells the Esquire story with wide-ranging aplomb and occasional redundancy. Though he strains a comparison of Tina Brown's editorship of the New Yorker with that of Gingrich at his magazine, it may be fairly surmised that Esky was Eustace Tilley's oversexed first cousin and perhaps a distant ancestor of that rabbit in the tuxedo who has an even more robust libido. (Playboy's Hefner worked at Esquire in his youth, Merrill informs us.) The Varga Girl is now a photograph, and old Esky seems to be celibate, but the elderly rascal in his day provided good reading and mindless ribaldry; and he had an attitude. (b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8135-2165-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
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.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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