A philosophical sketchbook, whose are of darkness and light swings somewhere between the silly and the sublime, between the poseur primping before his intellectual mirror and the truly troubled spirit trying to look within. It suggests Heraclitus: sentence fragments, speculative meanderings. Thus the classical artillery; the use of opposites ("polar nature of reality"), the metaphor of change ("Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean"); above all, the relation between the One (the aristos: isolated, independent seeker of inner wisdom and knowledge) and the Many (the unthinking, unfeeling Mass). Other points include Our Most Fashionable Problems: technology, oxistentialism, materialism, dehumanized art and sex, God and the Abyss. Clearly a Major Undertaking. With "labels": angora society (bad; today's acquisitive one), stoa society (good; sort of Shaw's Major Barbara utopianism), the Midas Situation, etc. Novelist Fowles, (author of the celebrated The Collector,) writes elegantly enough and has a fairly firm formal mind. His bent is towards the rational as against modernist irrationalism, but his raft, full of received ideas and hardly any primary experience, follows a confused course: he's a "planner" and existential, hieratic and humanistic. Here he is polemicising against what one takes to be the New Critics: what's taken as a criterion is not the meaning, but a skill in hinting at meanings". He concludes, "Any good computer will beat man at this." A crack which sums up his own voluminous tag-bag, biggest since The Outsider.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1964
ISBN: 0099755319
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1964
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
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