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LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

FROM BLOOD AND THUNDER TO HEARTH AND HOME

paper 1-55553-348-5 A collection of recycled essays and articles rather reverentially stressing the “Concord Scheherazade’s” development as a writer and a feminist. “Concord Scheherazade” is a description that Alcott herself would have eschewed as an example of “fine writing” best left to adolescents and amateurs. Stylistic quibbles aside, Stern (A Double Life, 1988) and her associate, Leona Rostenberg, who is also represented in this study, were the two who recovered the early “blood and thunder” writings of Alcott, published in tabloids like the Saturday Evening Gazette and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and collected and republished by Stern in the 1970s and ’80s. Stern, also the author of an Alcott biography, defends those early sensational stories as the workshop in which Alcott learned to develop character, to plot, and to please her readers. The essays in this volume were published between 1943 and 1995, but are arranged to follow Alcott’s life from her teenage passion for the theater to her enthusiastic support for women’s suffrage in the years before she died. Included is an article detailing Alcott’s reflections on her own writing, including letters to several of her publishers. Many of the essays offer repetitive information about the writing and publication of the early stories and Alcott’s post—Little Women career as author and editor of young people’s fiction. One chapter reports on the results of a phrenological reading that Alcott had done on a trip to New York, which showed her to have “strong passions . . . great powers of observation . . . great vitality,” among other positive attributes. Another chapter includes some of her feminist writings for Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal, one letter signed, “most heartily yours for woman suffrage and all other reforms.” Best suited for the libraries of those already Alcott buffs and collectors—all others would do better to explore Alcott by dipping once more into the adventures of Little Women’s Jo March, her alter ego.

Pub Date: May 8, 1998

ISBN: 1-55553-349-3

Page Count: 246

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998

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CALYPSO

Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.

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In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.

Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.

Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.

Pub Date: May 29, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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