Hamilton's book reviews and ``literary articles'' cover a broad span of time and a wide range of interesting and uninteresting subjects. There's little here in the way of penetrating analysis or critical energy to lift these pieces beyond the time-bound immediacy of the column or weekly review. He leads with his best, the first piece being ``A Biographer's Misgivings,'' wherein he discusses his own difficulties in writing and researching the lives of the poet Robert Lowell and the elusive J.D. Salinger. Sorting through the conflicting versions of important episodes in Lowell's tangled life left him wondering ``which Lowell life'' he should attend to. The Salinger biography, of course, with which he hoped ``to arouse in Salinger a sort of grudging curiosity,'' ended in the famous lawsuit and the publication of ``the legal version'' of his book. Most of the other pieces are straight book reviews with little resonance beyond their first appearance. His look at two widely different Sylvia Plath biographies elicits a somewhat muddled and unsolicited defense of the much-maligned Ted Hughes, while his take on a Robert Graves bio reminds him that the poet has ``always been thought of as a bit unsound . . . with . . . a touch of the bogus.'' He has high praise for Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint but little use for the ``weary fictioneering'' of Norman Mailer's ``Nile-long course of Ancient Evenings.'' Aldous Huxley's letters, he notes, show ``what his novels led us to expect: the apotheosis of arid intellectualism.'' A few of the essays will leave American readers cold and bewildered: the doings at the 1982 World Cup; a tough week for the cricketers at Lord's; an incomprehensible look at three books on the financial foibles of the Spurs football team. Hamilton's half-page foreword insufficiently introduces these writings: One wants background, grounding, some element to link such disparate topics into a unified body of work.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-48397-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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