paper 0-415-92151-1 Zipes (German/Univ. of Minnesota; Don—t Bet on the Prince, 1986, etc.), a children’s literature specialist, here gathers together his introductions and postscripts from various previous fairy tale collections. The result is a concise yet comprehensive picture of the genre’s development in Western Europe and America since the 1600s. Fairy tales thrived as an oral tradition for centuries before they were transcribed. Zipes argues that early tales didn—t target a juvenile audience; instead, their allegorical form often concealed social, moral, ethical, and aesthetic criticism appreciated only by adults. The pioneer of the genre in France was Charles Perrault, who created fairy tales drawing on pagan beliefs and folklore, rather than on antique sources, as the classicist canon of his time preferred. In Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm charged their tales with Protestant ethics, while Hans Christian Andersen negotiated power relations and social domination in Danish society. Due to religious austerity, fairy tales were suppressed in England until the middle of the 19th century. After they entered literature officially during the Victorian Age, they exhibited a strong didactic tendency, and eventually took shape as an implicit critical inquiry into the dominant materialist culture, the oppressive moral code, or, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, normative sexuality. Among American fairy tale writers, Zipes focuses particularly on Frank Baum, whose multivolume work on the utopian land of Oz became a fixture of the cultural landscape, embodying the author’s dream of a socialist alternative to American capitalism. Zipes skillfully weaves into his narrative the story of the influence of the Arabian Nights, translations of which began to appear in the West as early as the 1700s. At the close of his study, he also looks briefly at how the 20th-century German novelist Hermann Hesse infused the classical fairy tale with the macabre and romantic realism to reflect his personal journey and European political conflicts. An enticing reexamination of cherished texts. (15 illustrations) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92150-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
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