Robertson-Lorant's debut is a solid, eminently readable life of Herman Melville (1819-91), one of America's more enigmatic literary geniuses. Rather than build Melville up—and then hunt him down—as a ``Great White Male,'' Robertson-Lorant explores the sensitive soul of the creator of Moby-Dick—a sensitivity symbolized, to her mind, by Melville's death from ``an enlargement of the heart.'' Melville grew up in New York City and, after his father's life ended in disaster, went to sea as a cabin boy. He would travel the world before settling again in the US in his mid-20s. Turning to writing, Melville published the only works of his to find immediate popular success: the novels Typee and Omoo. Robertson-Lorant shows how these quasi-autobiographical tales of adventure in the Pacific were understood by Melville's readers in the 1840s to make significant, even radical, statements about sexuality and society. Melville married a judge's daughter, and moved in elite circles. But aside from a close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, he never really capitalized on his prominence. His subsequent books, most of which, like his masterpiece Moby-Dick, were epic allegorical romances, found few contemporary admirers. By the 1860s Melville had to accept work as a low-level customs bureaucrat. Family troubles—discord with his wife, and the apparent suicide of his son—plagued him. Displaying an impressive grasp of literary history, Robertson-Lorant ably catalogues Melville's intentions and unconscious impulses, relating them to the ups and downs of his personal and public lives. Her pacing is brisk throughout, her readings of Melville's fiction sophisticated and just, although they occasionally suffer from a touch of syntactical indigestion, as complicated deconstructive and gender concepts threaten to burst the bounds of mainstream biography. But the effort to incorporate such insights pays off, helping legitimate Robertson-Lorant's claim that Melville, while a sexual progressive, cannot be categorized by today's labels. Nonetheless, a fine guide to Melville's peregrinations in literature and in life. (40 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-59314-9
Page Count: 736
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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