Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of...
An award-winning historian curates this collection of 26 bits of fiction, essay and journalism about the denizens, grifters and debutantes of London Town.
White (History/Univ. of London; A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century, 2012, etc.), who spent the last two decades chronicling the history of London through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries over three volumes, has now produced a literary companion to the city. Unfortunately for casual readers, he's selected a curious, somewhat dispassionate, and largely homogenous collection of little-known essays, most of which are long past their copyright dates. The collection spans four decades, starting with dire depictions of London gripped in the black heart of the Great Plague, only to rise from the ashes of the Great Fire barely half a century later. Some stories show that London always has been and always will be a hard place, as Thomas De Quincey relates his relationship with a teenage prostitute in “Ann of Oxford Street” and Henry Mayhew relates his exchange with an 8-year-old sex worker in “Watercress Girl,” both unnerving images for any Londoner who has been hit with that awful query, “Business?” The classics are duly incorporated as well, with entries from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Graham Greene. Physician Frederick Treves makes for an interesting anomaly with his moving first-person remembrance of Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man.” Oddly, the second world war gets little coverage, mostly a nod from combat firefighter William Sansom in “The Wall.” Also, considering what a multicultural city London has become, the editor has selected few portraits of the city's current population. Dominican writer Jean Rhys deservedly earns an entry, as does Scottish novelist Muriel Spark and celebrated British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. But anyone expecting to find the likes of Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, or Zoe Heller will have to keep trudging down the high street.
Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of cuttings from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-71246-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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