Malcolm (The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990, etc.) explores psychoanalysis, art, literature, and her native Czechoslovakia in this provocative collection of essays, all of which originally appeared in either The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. The first third of the book, consisting of four essays on psychoanalysis, plays in a minor key on themes in Malcolm's In the Freud Archives (1984) and Psychoanalysis (1981), including Freud's accidental discovery of transference in the famous ``Dora'' case and attempts by today's practitioners to refurbish the movement's ``sagging and peeling mansion.'' Malcolm's erudition is seen to its best advantage in a series of reviews that cover Milan Kundera; Thomas Eakins; Tom Wolfe; Ved Mehta; V†clav Havel's prison letters to his wife; a memoir of New Guinea; and the now-little-read Victorian Sir Edmund Gosse (letters by Gosse's contemporary defenders, Malcolm says, ``form an authoritative primer on how to write comforting bullshit on demand''). The three extended profiles that conclude the book—on an unorthodox therapist whose session the author observes through a one-way mirror; on Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy; and on a former Czech dissident adjusting to career and political uncertainties in post-Communist Czechoslovakia—show how Malcolm can fascinate as often as she irritates. Her sense of irony sometimes manages to disrupt the placid surface of her lengthy, quote-laden journalism (reading Jay Haley, a writer in the social-science field, ``is like being in the bedroom of a charming cad''). But it can also, for instance, make one wonder why Malcolm feels the New York art world is worth so much attention if so many of its artists and critics, as depicted here, are such pretentious boors. Malcolm at her lucid, informed, sometimes too-clever-by-half best, and minus the questionable journalism characterized by her imbroglios with Fatal Vision author Joe McGinniss and renegade Freud researcher Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41232-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
IN THE NEWS
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
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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