Fans of historical fiction will have fun with Carnes’s study, and would-be novelists might benefit from having a look at it,...
A sometimes amusing if generally inconsequential set of essays on fiction-writers’ use (and occasional misuse) of history.
Following the model he established with Past Imperfect (1995), Carnes (History/Barnard Coll.) elicits from his scholarly peers comments on representative historical fictions that have been published, mainly, in the last 40 years. In response to their comments come sometimes defensive, sometimes befuddled, and sometimes gracious and grateful remarks by the novelists in question. Historian Elliott West, for instance, notes historical inaccuracies in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a novel that offers “a virtually full roster of the Western’s most familiar characters” and is thus as mythical as any other horse opera. Blinking at the command to draw, McMurtry answers that “A long novel often involves such sloppiness.” By contrast, when his attention is drawn to inaccuracies in Burr, the famously prickly Gore Vidal goes snide, while William Styron bobs and weaves around Eugene Genovese’s furious jabs at The Confessions of Nat Turner. Annie Dillard, after noted historian Richard White demonstrates her novel The Living to be a mass of misunderstandings and useless inventions, doesn’t bother to respond at all. Neither does Barbara Kingsolver, though her 1998 The Poisonwood Bible stands up pretty well under Dianne Kunz’s fact-testing examination. For the most part, the historians here are gentle—often, in fact, too gentle—with their storytelling subjects, while the novelists respond for the most part with some variant of “Well, I wasn’t writing a dissertation.”
Fans of historical fiction will have fun with Carnes’s study, and would-be novelists might benefit from having a look at it, too—and then double-checking their facts. After all, as historian John Lukacs observes here, “Every novel is a historical novel.”Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85765-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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