edited by Laurence Bogoslaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2018
Well-organized and edited, this intriguing volume should serve as an excellent resource to those thoroughly interested in...
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A collection of articles and editorials from the Russian press focuses on President Donald Trump.
Given the flood of coverage in America concerning Trump’s connections to Russia, that country’s effect on the 2016 election, and U.S.–Russian relations under the new administration, debut editor Bogoslaw does a great service in providing a compilation of Russian pieces concerning the leader and his presidency. The well-structured book goes far toward addressing the often myopic view of U.S. readers by challenging the American public to see Trump from an international perspective. The editor begins with selections regarding Trump as a businessman and entertainment figure from the days before his foray into politics. The work then moves on to coverage of the Trump campaign. These pieces, though differing in opinions, point to the wide support that he had in Russia as he campaigned against Hillary Clinton. “It is sad,” notes one article, but a recent “Gallup poll clearly shows that Trump and his American admirers have now become a mirror image of today’s Russian mass consciousness.” The book moves on to coverage of Trump’s election victory, asking “How did this happen?” and “What next?” Moving forward, the volume presents pieces regarding the administration’s “Russia ties” and his first months in office from the perspective of foreign policy. Bogoslaw points out a number of captivating aspects of Russian coverage as the work moves along, such as this insight: “Even when Russian commentators are most confused, disappointed and even outraged by Trump’s decisions, they do not impugn his character, honesty or intelligence—unlike their counterparts in the West, particularly in the US.” Editorial comments also clarify a number of finer points for American readers, such as an explanation of “yarky,” an adjective Vladimir Putin once use to describe Trump. While the U.S. press largely translated the term as “brilliant,” it is explained that the word more properly means “colorful.” Opinions of the writers quoted range from excitedly pro-Trump to vehemently anti-Trump and almost every shade in between.
Well-organized and edited, this intriguing volume should serve as an excellent resource to those thoroughly interested in Trump’s position on the world stage.Pub Date: May 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-879944-89-3
Page Count: 402
Publisher: East View Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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