Fashion commentator and New Yorker contributor Fraser (Scenes from the Fashionable World, 1987) explores literary and other lives in a collection of 13 reportorial, critical, and personal essays. Fraser's approach to feminism does not punish or exclude men; they, too, receive her penetrating attention. She tends to write about paradoxical relations between the sexes, while emphasizing women and their view of themselves. For example, her essay about Louise Colet, ``Love, Longing, and Letters,'' is also about Colet's sometime lover Flaubert, exploring how this Parisian ``daughter of Romanticism . . . came closest to getting past his guard.'' Her piece on the Dutch painter Vermeer considers him in terms of the women he painted and lived with. Even when focusing directly on one woman, as she does so elegantly with the fashion designer known as Valentina, Fraser takes care to render the larger milieu, male and female, sympathetically—without withholding characteristically spritely judgment. She is a stylist of such natural, melodious grace that one is immediately entranced. The title essay, addressing Virginia Woolf's misery as a victim of childhood incest, is particularly bittersweet and particularly satisfying, drawing from Fraser a well-modulated passion that heightens her usual verve. The Colet piece succeeds less well, perhaps because Colet is far less reachable from the factual record (her letters to Flaubert have not survived). But the book is studded throughout with the sort of joyous, alert description that is uncommonly encountered in journalism or in criticism. As an almost faultless master of tone, Fraser is able to pass from scene to scene with a selfless vitality. You don't forget her presence, because you admire her tact, her spirit, and her modesty, but she never obscures the story she wants to tell. ``Doves spread sun-pierced wing fans and looped with purring drumroll sounds overhead.'' Fraser's skill is to make such observation, while artful, feel entirely artless. Her fans will only wish that she would write more.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-58539-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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