The best of these essays are more than mildly charming, but Epstein’s self-satisfied opinions can be more than mildly...
A prolific essayist offers forthright opinions on literature, writing, culture, and aging.
The former editor of the American Scholar, Epstein (Emeritus, English/Northwestern Univ.; Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays, 2016, etc.) gathers recent essays, most published in Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Having turned 80 in 2017, Epstein takes pride in being “out of it,” oblivious to popular culture, contemporary novels, art, and politics. As a younger man, he describes himself as having been a “strong liberal, leaning to the radical in politics,” but the social and political upheaval of the 1960s changed those views profoundly. As a teacher at Northwestern, he saw intellectual authority questioned and sullied. In several essays he laments “the death of traditional liberalism” as represented by Hubert Humphrey and Lionel Trilling and the rise of “dogmatic academic feminism, victimological African-American Studies,” and the widespread prevalence of “victim studies.” As a result, there “has been the emphasis on race, class, and gender and the concomitant politicalization—some would add trivialization—of much that goes on in the humanities and social sciences departments.” Victimhood is not limited to academia, according to Epstein, but pervades literature (memoir and the fiction of Toni Morrison, “a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else”) and politics. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, writes the author, are not evaluated “on their intrinsic qualities” but “because of the accidents of their birth; because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled.” Epstein waxes nostalgic for the serene gentility of WASP culture. Gone are the days, he writes, when “stability, solidity, gravity, a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life.” Although “in our egalitarian age,” cultural elitism is damned, Epstein happily champions “the best that has been thought and said.” In an essay on wit, the author modestly admits that he is not witty but “mildly charming.”
The best of these essays are more than mildly charming, but Epstein’s self-satisfied opinions can be more than mildly infuriating.Pub Date: May 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60419-123-3
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Axios Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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