In another of his able (if not overly inspired) surveys, Bradbury (The Modern American Novel, 1983, etc.) traces the ``flourishing traffic in fancy, fiction, dream, and myth'' between the old world and the new. Ranging from Washington Irving and Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis, Bradbury attempts to reveal, as reflected in European (primarily British) and American fiction, ``the barter of myths and illusions,'' the ways in which writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic have imagined (and influenced) each other's societies. He points out that the fantasies that each have nursed of the other have often had a profound impact and have sometimes led to disillusion. The protagonist of Herman Melville's novel Redburn goes to England and discovers that the idyllic travel guides he's read have little to do with reality. Such works, Melville writes, ``are the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide- books.'' Bradbury considers Chateaubriand's Indian romance Atala, Washington Irving's History of New York and Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and the works of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain, among others, as he plots the ways in which ideas of American ``innocence'' and European ``civilization'' have clashed, flourished, and intermingled. Toward the end he flags a bit, giving perfunctory summaries of the Lost Generation and Modernism, but the narrative revives in his discussion of the the perennially new America imagined by the French critics Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Bradbury suspects that, despite the emergence of a new ``Euro-identity,'' and despite America's growing interest in the Pacific Rim, the great fictions that Europe and America share, and which are ``part of our essential record of human understanding,'' will retain their power. Bradbury necessarily skimps here and there, but he digests, summarizes, and critiques enough to make this into a readable, useful, original guide.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86625-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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