A lively collection of the iconoclastic English theater man’s correspondence. “Critic” is too confining a word for the wide-ranging abilities of Kenneth Tynan (1927—80), although from 1951 to 1963 he wrote unfailingly stimulating theater reviews for several London periodicals and for the New Yorker magazine. In 1963 he joined England’s newly formed National Theatre as literary manager, shaping over the next decade (with artistic director Laurence Olivier) a varied program of classics and contemporary plays, some of a politically or sexually provocative nature that prompted confrontations with the British censors and the National Theatre’s board. Tynan continued as a journalist during and after those years, primarily writing profiles of performers; he also devised the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! His letters chronicle all this activity with the same verve, wit, and gift for invective that distinguish his criticism. His widow, Kathleen Tynan, selected the material and provided the notes and expository paragraphs before her death in 1995. This background is helpful, if sometimes unduly comprehensive. Also, too much of the text (one-fourth) is devoted to Tynan’s correspondence as a teenager and Oxford undergraduate, in which he displays an unattractive arrogance and flippancy (“I would rather write amusingly and inaccurately than correctly and tediously”) that moderated as he matured. His easy manner occasionally gave the impression that Tynan was a lightweight, a notion effectively countered here by thoughtful, detailed critiques of productions he worked on and by letters voicing his strongly left-wing political and social convictions. Once past the youthful posturing, the correspondence builds by accretion of detail an appealing portrait of a warm, intelligent man passionately engaged in the arts of his time. Consistently absorbing and entertaining, though it would have benefitted from more judicious editing. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42610-8
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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