A lively peek into literary genius.
A tour of the various sources of inspiration for beloved works of literature.
Debut author Grogan was once given a familiar piece of advice—“Make a list of the people who inspire you, then go learn everything you can about who inspired them”—and he turned it into this unconventional and ambitious research project. He investigates the origins of 202 famous works of literature and briefly synopsizes the circumstances of each, typically in a page or so. The author focuses on the creative afflatus that preceded each work, and he attempts to pin down just how an author arrived at the general idea or a key character and why each felt compelled to pursue that particular spark of imagination. Ultimately, Grogan found that the most common seedbed of creativity is personal experience, which, as he demonstrates, can be understood broadly. For example, both Hermann Hesse and Sylvia Plath conjured stories out of their own specific forms of anguish. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was partially based on her own encounters with racism but also on interviews that she conducted with sharecroppers who’d been threatened with eviction. Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle was largely inspired by his co-workers at General Electric, and he modeled the character of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, in particular, on Nobel laureate Dr. Irving Langmuir. Maurice Sendak loathed his weekly visits from his family members when he lived in Brooklyn, and the caricatures he drew of his relatives became the beasts in Where the Wild Things Are. Grogan’s research is meticulous and empirical—he often draws from published interviews with the authors in question and lets them speak for themselves. His own prose is more informally anecdotal than scholarly in tone, and it’s so breezily accessible that there’s no need to read the vignettes all at once or in any particular order. Some accounts are more speculative than others; for example, it’s not indisputable, for instance, that Franz Kafka was motivated to write The Metamorphosis because of his dysfunctional relationship with his father. However, even Grogan’s speculations are consistently thoughtful and enjoyable.
A lively peek into literary genius.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60433-751-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Cider Mill Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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