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PARIS IN MIND

Name: PARIS IN MIND
Author: Jennifer Lee
ISBN: 1-4000-3102-8

edited by Jennifer Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 4, 2003

Not that Paris needs more lovers, but it’s good to know that she still overwhelms all, even the comics.

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A host of literate Americans, from Ben Franklin to Dave Barry, go mostly gaga over Paris.

There’s a name for the spirit of this uneven collection—topophilia, love of place. These pieces are old familiars, but for many, their shopworn quality has burnished their power rather than dimmed it. A.J. Liebling took a date to Montparnasse, which, “although not a long walk from the Quarter, had all the attributes of a foreign country,” while David Sedaris seemed rarely to leave the movie house: “Aside from the occasional trip to the flea market, my knowledge of Paris is limited to what I learned in Gigi.” Much humor follows: Art Buchwald, Mark Twain, Dave Barry, who has a delightfully goofy conversation with a waiter, in French (“Good day. I suspect you are an American.” “But I am not wearing the sneakers!” “OK, Mr. Smarty Pants, pronounce the word ‘Rouen’ ”) and rubs shoulders with T.S. Eliot, who appears to have sat on a broomstick when he got to the city: “The right way is to take it as a place and a tradition, rather than as a congeries of people who are mostly futile and timewasting.” Thomas Jefferson figured that “had there been no queen, there would have been no revolution,” and Saul Bellow understood that even “God would be perfectly happy in France. . . . Surrounded by unbelievers, He, too, could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do in their favorite cafes.” Absurdly, food gets short shrift: even with such treasures to choose from, Lee has selected forgettable material and squandered her M.F.K. Fisher opportunity on something that can seem only, if graciously, understandable as some insider’s joke.

Not that Paris needs more lovers, but it’s good to know that she still overwhelms all, even the comics.

Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2003

ISBN: 1-4000-3102-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A REVOLUTION IN THREE ACTS
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
WILLIAM GOLDING
by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MASSES
by John Carey

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SLEEPERS

by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995

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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)