by Jameson Currier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2015
A remarkable collection of hard-earned, melancholic wisdom.
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Novelist Currier (A Gathering Storm, 2014, etc.) collects four decades of essays in this nonfiction volume.
In the 59 pieces contained in this volume, which Currier says is “as close as I may come to publishing a memoir,” he examines the relationships, jobs, passions, and health problems that shaped the course of his long writing life. From his childhood in conservative, suburban Georgia to his experiences in New York City’s gay community during the AIDS crisis to developments in LGBT civil rights, Currier mines his memory to present an intimate, if necessarily incomplete, self-portrait composed over many years. In “Passing Grades,” a 30-year-old Currier worries that he’s becoming less attractive to strangers on the street. “That Summer” has the author returning to a beach town where he once spent a season with a close friend, now dead. In “Lessons,” he describes coming out of self-imposed celibacy to have an affair with a man who’s married to a woman. These are all morality tales of a sort that an older man might wish he could share with his younger self. In many cases, the author attempts to figure out just where things went wrong—where a mistake was made, what it taught him, and whether he learned enough, at the time of writing, not to make such an error again. Currier is a masterful essayist, adept at lingering over a meaningful detail or capturing a complex emotion in a simple phrase. Of remembering his deceased friend, for example, he writes: “ ‘My friend’ becomes an emptied phrase repeated throughout the years.” There’s also charming humor, as when he describes seeing his first musical, a touring production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown: “it was the most inspirational thing I had ever seen; it was as if I had personally discovered the face of Jesus on the side of a potato.” The mix of voices and perspectives, all from one man at different ages and states of maturity, gives this collection a kaleidoscopic quality, and a multifarious vision emerges that’s simultaneously fractured and whole.
A remarkable collection of hard-earned, melancholic wisdom.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937627-17-1
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
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
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