Taken together, these pieces attest to a true life, a life well-lived and well-written.
Previously published but not collected until now, these magazine pieces reflect the author’s wide range of experience and interests as well as his prose mastery.
Salter (1925-2015) was best known for his fiction (All That Is, 2013, etc.), but these essays not only reflect a prolific career in literary journalism, but also show how much magazines have changed in the last half-century or so. There’s an insightful interview with Nabokov, one that extends well beyond Lolita and which had to be written from memory because the subject, already reluctant, wouldn’t allow notes. It ends on this autumnal note: “The light is fading, there is no one else in the room or the room beyond. The hotel has many mirrors, some of them on doors, so it is like a house of illusion, part vision, part reflection, and rich with dreams.” What a surprise to learn that this was a 1975 assignment for People, which no longer would be expected to publish such a writer on such an author. These aren’t selections from literary journals but rather from travel and food magazines and other general-interest publications. A West Point graduate and Korean War fighter pilot, Salter chronicles the changes in that institution and his near-death experiences. He also writes of his decision to leave the military and devote himself full time to his writing, hoping that he could somehow support his wife and family. “It was the most difficult act of my life,” he writes. But it paid off, not only in literary acclaim, but in sidelights such as writing for the screen and the theater (the subject of “Passionate Falsehoods,” a deliciously acerbic 1997 New Yorker piece about observing from the periphery of the film world) and making documentaries. “There is something called the true life,” writes Salter, “which I cannot describe and which perhaps varies as one sees it from different angles and at different times.”
Taken together, these pieces attest to a true life, a life well-lived and well-written.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-936-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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