There are too many ephemeral or weakly written pieces to appeal beyond Baldwin’s devoted admirers, but the best of the ’60s...
A grab bag of pieces from novelist and firebrand Baldwin (1924–1987), varying in quality but marked by his trademark ferocity.
The author’s best-known and most powerful nonfiction pieces have long been available in book form (The Price of the Ticket, 1985, etc.), so inevitably this book has a B-list feel to it. Most disposable are the book reviews he wrote in the late ’40s, which reveal a writer struggling to find his voice, and in which he takes swipes at Maxim Gorky, Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain with little subtlety or insight. But by the late ’50s and early ’60s, Baldwin’s thinking about American racism matured, balancing reason and outrage, and many of the pieces are worthy companions to his provocative essay collection The Fire Next Time (1963). In “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” published in 1962, he pleads for an American literature that abandons lost-innocence themes embraced by Hemingway and Faulkner, and throughout his ’60s essays he critiques an American society that had failed to face its hypocrisy head-on. The book is perhaps best read as a showcase for Baldwin’s versatility—he was comfortable covering theater, music and sports through the filter of race. In a long-form reported piece on the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston prizefight in 1962, the author displays an admirable eye for detail of the boxers as well as the reporters and hangers-on. Similarly, a series of letters from Turkey, Israel and France expose his private concerns about his work as he was finishing his controversial novel Another Country (1962), while the transcript of a 1984 panel on blacks and Jews provides evidence of how well Baldwin could think on the fly.
There are too many ephemeral or weakly written pieces to appeal beyond Baldwin’s devoted admirers, but the best of the ’60s essays underscore the reasons his work endures.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37882-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The world didn't lose a great journalist when Gloria Steinem focused her energies on feminist activism—but because she was a working journalist (and, from 1968, political columnist for first-person-prone New York magazine), the light bulb goes on right here. This first collection of her writings (also, her first book) leads off with autobiographical comments: on the speaking she's done instead of writing, and how difficult ("a major hurdle in my life") and ultimately rewarding it was (kudos on both scores to her black lecture partners); on her earlier writing career, or the frustrations of frivolous, "girl reporter" assignments; on her first stabs at "telling the truth in public" and other outcomes of a "growing consciousness." From the pre-feminist writing, she includes only "I Was a Playboy Bunny"—a 1963 "exposÉ" of the crippling grind, the miserable pay, the sexual harassment (said a co-worker: "If you can type, what the hell do you want to be a Bunny for?")—and the first parts of a section of campaign reports, 1965-72. It's there, in 1968, that the "Feminist Realization" (born of covering women's meetings) hits home—eliciting the kind of protest that would quickly become a groundswell: "Six months ago I would have been honored by McGovern's invitation to a 'serious' (i.e., male and therefore grownup) political meeting, but full of doubt about whether I could contribute in a 'serious' (male) way. . . . I couldn't admit that any power relationship in life is political: therefore politics for women may be who's doing the dishes, or who's getting paid half the wages that a man would get for the same job, or who's expected to take the roles of service and support everywhere, including in political campaigns." A dozen pages later, after the 1972 Democratic Convention (Chisholm for president, Farenthold for V.P.): "Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers, or mindless policy-makers. . . ." That sense of being in at the creation is diluted by the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces in the remaining two-thirds of the book—pieces that are essentially feminist polemics whether the subject is food (women's smaller share or "Erotica vs. Pornography," (good) Jackie Kennedy or the (bad) heroine of Sophie's Choice. A partial exception is "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)," Steinem's previously unpublished memoir of her mentally-disturbed mother—whom she regards as a victim but also celebrates as a life-force. Still, her particular talent has been for perceiving the feminist angle, in her own writing and for Ms., and spreading that recognition. If some of the ideas here sound hackneyed, she has honest claim to them.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0452257107
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
IN THE NEWS
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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