An intermittently entertaining but sometimes banal collection.
A miscellany of literary musings.
Journalist and critic Zane (Journalism and Mass Communication/St. Augustine’s Univ.; co-author: Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization, 2012, etc.) has gathered over 100 columns he wrote between 1997 and 2009, when he was review editor and books columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer. Organized into a dozen thematic sections—contemporary fiction, Southern writers, book culture and sensationalism, etc.—the book, writes the author, offers “an overview of a period of dazzling, and sometimes lamentable change…marked by the rise of the Internet and the confessional memoir as well as the decline of the independent bookstore and the continued marginalization of serious literature and ideas.” Although serious ideas fuel some of the essays, Zane’s breezy tone is closer to Dave Barry than Sven Birkerts or Peter Gay, whom he lists among many writers who inspire him. In a piece about Andrea Dworkin, Zane admits that he came to her memoir with the image of a “foul-mouthed, fat feminist who favored overalls” in his mind and was surprised to find that she had “a provocative mind” that “challenged convention.” The memoir, he writes, “reminded me to resist the urge to stereotype and marginalize strong women.” In “What’s Up with the Muslims?” he concludes that “the overwhelming majority…pose no danger,” and “the relatively small number of hard-core ideologues...are driven by political goals, not religion.” In a column on the environment, he writes, “my idea of roughing it is hiking to the store, hunting for bargains or fishing for something to wear.” Nevertheless, he agrees with Bill McKibben that “to save Mother Earth, we must also get to know her better.” Turning to Southern writers, Zane’s pieces on Faulkner, Welty and Sedaris are appreciative rather than analytical.
An intermittently entertaining but sometimes banal collection.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61117-508-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Bryson is a real traveler, the kind of guy who can be entertained by (and be entertaining about) a featureless landscape...
Just in time for Sydney’s upcoming Olympic games, this travel narrative from veteran wanderer Bryson (I’m a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.) provides an appreciative, informative, and hilarious portrait of the land Down Under.
“And so once more to the wandering road,” declares Bryson—which is music to the ears of his many deserving fans. This time it is Australia, a country tailor-made to surrender just the kind of amusing facts Bryson loves. It was here, after all, that the Prime Minister dove into the surf of Victoria one day and simply disappeared—the prime minister, mind you. There are more things here to kill you than anywhere else in the world: all of the ten most poisonous snakes, sharks and crocodiles in abundance, the paralytic tick, and venomous seashells that will “not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you.” A place harsh and hostile to life, “staggeringly empty yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained.” And Bryson finds it everywhere: in the Aborigines (who evidently invented and mastered oceangoing craft 30,000 years before anyone else, then promptly forgot all about the sea), in the Outback (“where men are men and sheep are nervous”), in stories from the days of early European exploration (of such horrific proportions they can be appreciated only as farce), and in the numerous rural pubs (where Bryson learns the true meaning of a hangover). Bryson is still open to wonder at the end of his pilgrimage: the grand and noble Uluru (once known as Ayer’s Rock) reaches right down into his primordial memory and gives it a stir. “I’m just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship this is where I would start digging. That’s all I'm saying.”
Bryson is a real traveler, the kind of guy who can be entertained by (and be entertaining about) a featureless landscape scattered with “rocks the color of bad teeth.” Fortunately for him and for us, there’s a lot more to Australia than that.Pub Date: June 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-7679-0385-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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