by John Cheever ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1973
It would be hard to think of a more casual or disarming writer than John Cheerer whose stories — this is his first collection in nine years — begin with those marvelously underhanded first lines: "The subject today will be the metaphysics of obesity, and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth" or "Reminiscence, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea." Thus one is launched into a world of myth or illusion or just suburban conformity — there's a new St. Botolphs story where people are once again living "with composure, lives of grueling boredom" — sometimes interrupted by a rogue impulse ("Mr. X. defecated in his wife's top drawer" — or the Cabot daughter who ran away with her mother's ugly seven diamond rings "as glamorous as a passbook"). There's no demonic horror on the lawn or anywhere else this time but another kind of contemporary disfigurement in "Mene, Mene, Tekl, Upharsin." And the title story is about a famous expatriate Nobel prize poet overcome in his old age by an unseemly lewdness. Be it admitted that none of these stories have the memorability (dreadful, debased, unavoidable word) of Cheerer's country husband or his cross-country swimmer but . . . but me no buts. . . all those pleasurable constants are there the bitter lemon nostalgia, the affectionate and truly moral concern, and above all that skewed element of surprise which makes the Cheerer story a rara avis — a bird that can fly on one wing if necessary.
Pub Date: May 1, 1973
ISBN: 0736608265
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
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by John Cheever and edited by Blake Bailey
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by John Cheever
by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
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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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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