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CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICAN NOVELISTS

Name: CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICAN NOVELISTS
Author: Kay Bonetti
ISBN: 0-8262-1136-4

edited by Kay Bonetti ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1997

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Fifteen interviews of both literary and commercial novelists, recorded over the past two decades by Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library and all originally published in the Missouri Review. As the editors point out in their introduction, these writers are ``chronologically postmodern.'' True, but few of the novelists, who include Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, John Edgar Wideman, Rosellen Brown, Scott Turow, Robb Forman Dew, and Jessica Hagedorn, would seem to fit the self-conscious, often playful, ``metafictional'' postmodern vein of writers like John Barth, William Gaddis, or Thomas Pynchon. The interviews are more about ideas, publishing histories, and reputations than about craft. Robert Stone, interviewed in 1982, says those who interpret the underlying message in his writing as ``Despair and die'' are mistaken. He cites Dickens as a role model for his ability to entertain himself and his readers with plot. His favorite novel? The Great Gatsby. Jamaica Kincaid (1991) desribes writing New Yorker ``Talk of the Town'' pieces as excellent preparation for fiction writing. What's missing largely from these interviews are technical discussions of the mechanics of writing dialogue and fleshing out characters, and of working methods (who uses a journal, who writes longhand or by typewriter or computer), the ecstasy and grind of composition. But these lacks don't detract from the information we are given. One of the best pieces is the talk with Louise Erdrich and the late Michael Dorris, conducted in 1986. The husband-and-wife team discuss the general strategy of their unusual collaborationist writing approach—they plot their novels together, but one or the other does the first draft; that person's name then goes on the finished product, such as Love Medicine (hers) and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (his). Like a selection of one-act plays, these conversations offer illuminating if limited glimpses of contemporary writing careers.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-8262-1136-4

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Univ. of Missouri

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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ARTHUR FIEDLER

PAPA, THE POPS, AND ME

by Johanna Fiedler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 1994

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The daughter of Boston's beloved maestro transposes the familiar laments of a star's adult child into the world of classical music. In the course of his 50-year tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra, Arthur Fiedler emerged as a true celebrity. Beyond his musical flair and dashing appearance, he exhibited a knack for marketing. He made his reputation by organizing America's first annual series of free outdoor symphony orchestra concerts on Boston's Charles River Esplanade. On taking over the Pops in 1930, he built a national following, and in his last decades, the PBS ``Evening at Pops'' television broadcasts cemented his fame. The Arthur Fiedler whom the public adored, however, turns out— surprise!—to have distanced himself from his family, immersing himself in his career and continuing to live the high life while on tour. When at home, he would show himself to be misanthropic, miserly, and alcoholic. Fiedler fille details in a clear style how this behavior impeded her personal growth. After a withdrawn, troubled childhood, she came to have difficulties of her own with alcohol and searched into adulthood for a father figure—for instance, dating musicians, some ``hand-picked'' by her father, all with forceful, dominating personalities like his. Her complaints against Fiedler päre seem valid, but the dysfunctional Fiedler family nevertheless strikes the reader as having been more typical of the mid-century upper middle class than traumatic in the ``Daddy Dearest'' vein. More intriguing sections of her book narrate her family's singular accomplishments: her grandfather's emigration from Austria to join the Boston Symphony, her father's navigation of the tides of cultural politics and of nationalist sentiment during WW I, and his endeavors to prove his mettle as a serious artist. That he loved dogs, fire engines, and women while hating children is, in the end, relatively uninteresting. Only Fiedler enthusiasts and habituÇs of the classical music scene will want to wade through the run-of-the-mill pop psychologizing featured here.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1994

ISBN: 0-385-42391-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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AN HONOURABLE DEFEAT

THE FIGHT AGAINST NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN GERMANY, 1933-1945

by Anton Gill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 1994

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A succinct, informative, and well-written history of attempts by Germans to kill or overthrow Hitler. Gill, an Anglo-German historian (A Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars, p. 192), focuses largely on the resistance network within the German ``establishment'': the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, the Foreign Office, the Abwehr (German secret service), and, above all, the army. Focusing on the years 193844, he chronicles such key events as the coup d'Çtat planned by a group of officers at the time of the Munich crisis, a coup they would have implemented had Hitler gone to war instead of winning major concessions from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Such efforts culminated in the July 20, 1944, near-miss of a bomb assassination attempt against Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. It resulted in massive bloodletting against thousands of real and suspected conspirators, was widely denounced within the Third Reich, and was undervalued both abroad and in postwar West Germany, but a July 1944 New York Times editorial aptly called the bombing an ``honorable treason.'' In colorful prose, the author demonstrates how possible anti-Nazi uprisings and assassination attempts were repeatedly thwarted by the conspirators' dawdling and individual failures of nerve, by Allied (particularly British) indifference and mistrust of the conspirators, and by bad luck. He scants communist resistance, although he does delve into the White Rose and other German student groups. Unfortunately, Gill makes almost no mention of Germans who hid or otherwise aided Jews, political dissidents, or those threatened by the ``euthanasia'' campaign. Still, he skillfully uses German and English sources and provides a chart illustrating the resistance network and a ``Who's Who'' of anti-Hitler conspirators. Like the late Barbara Tuchman, Gill has deftly synthesized scholarly and more popular historical writing to produce an impressively accessible and interesting work. (Maps, 25 b&w photos, not seen)