Like The Friday Book (1984), a collection of eclectic and irregularly insightful essays by the noted novelist—an admixture of reminiscence, manifesto, and review. Barth devotes one day a week to writing essay-lectures on such favorite topics as literary forms, traditions, and styles; the Chesapeake Bay area; his own books; or all those subjects at once in "a kind of thinking out loud [or] teaching oneself." Throughout these discursive pieces, the writer links his ideas loosely with his literary touchstones: Scheherazade, Don Quixote, Borges, Garcia Marquez, and the inconclusive, contested definiendum "postmodernism." His professionally well told memoirs of his second wife's profession ("Teacher") and his encounters with Borges are shot through with both incidental allusions and in-depth references, as are his idiosyncratic critical pieces, ranging from the aesthetic merits of the Chesapeake local arts and crafts to a concentrated reading of "Jack and Jill" and a consideration of Poe's gruesome genre effects in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. '4' Lectures: The Stuttgart Seminars on Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque'' and a bravura triad on minimalism, maximalism, and the short story skillfully interweave all the sources and concerns of Barth's shorter, unrelated essays. Some of his comparisons are highly inventive (for example, the similarities among postmodernist referentialism, chaotic feedback, and the repetitive patterns of Persian carpets, together with their parallels in literature), but they tend to lack, or avoid, a conclusion. If this noncommittal reflex handicaps the writer's scrappy mini-manifestos against creative writing programs and realism ("Very Like an Elephant"), it keeps his discussions of storytelling clear and effective. A dilettante par excellence, Barth has read intelligently and indiscriminately enough to have something interesting to say at almost any time.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-08324-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
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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