After deferential personal reminiscences and a hostile authorized biography, Frost is finally portrayed here as equally complex in both his poetry and his personality. Although Lawrance Thompson's detail-drenched three-volume authorized biography stripped Frost of his folksy public persona, it not only nakedly displayed, in Meyers's words, ``a pathological hatred'' toward its subject, but also concealed Thompson's affair with Kay Morrison, Frost's secretary, literary executor, and lover. Biographies by Sidney Cox and Elizabeth Sergeant have been more benevolent, and Frost's editor Stanley Burnshaw has attacked Thompson's objectivity. Drawing on all of this work, prolific biographer Meyers (Edmund Wilson, 1995, etc.) depicts Frost as an incompetent farmer and a wayward student, but an innovative teacher and a canny and erudite poet, as adept in versification as in literary rivalry. The most amusing sections deal with Frost's serio-comic relations with other poets, such as Ezra Pound, with whom Frost quarrelled in England before his (Frost's) first success, then helped to bail out of the insane asylum; Carl Sandburg, who was Frost's rival for all-American poetic simplicity; and T.S. Eliot, who started as a Modernist competitor but ended as a fellow grand old man of letters. Frost's personal life receives close but compassionate scrutiny, for if Meyers paints Frost as a demanding husband and domineering paterfamilias, he allows him grief for the series of family tragedies that darkened his famous later years. Frost ends as a model of his hero, Thomas Hardy, revered and still productive, but Meyers underscores the aged Frost's pessimism and desperate need for recognition. That need led him from ``barding about'' on the lecture circuit to the Kennedy inauguration and good-will visits abroad. Notwithstanding a certain critical padding and occasional harshness, Meyers's biography gives a readable, sympathetic portrait of Frost without sacrificing either the dark poet or the affable public New Englander. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-72809-6
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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