A racy, raunchy, entertaining reimagining of ancient Greece.
Historical recovery of an Athenian playwright who scandalized his society.
Novelist, screenwriter, and comedy writer Smith takes the now-forgotten playwright Ariphrades as the central character in his breezy, bawdy riff on fifth-century Greece, contemporary Greek life, the significance of art, his own development as a writer, women’s equality, wine, conviviality, pleasure, and sex. Smith’s interest in the obscure playwright was piqued when he came upon this quotation in Courtesans and Fishcakes, British historian James Davidson’s 1998 book about classical Athens: “At some point in the last quarter of the fifth century a man called Ariphrades had managed to acquire notoriety as a practitioner of cunnilingus.” In a culture where Dionysian festivals featured drunken parades of men “carrying large cocks and shouting obscenities as they cavorted through town,” Ariphrades’ reputation seemed curious, to say the least; consequently, Smith set out to find out what was behind it. Aristophanes—“the big swinging cock of Athenian comedy”—regularly took aim at Ariphrades in his satirical plays, which themselves were “colorful, loud, and very rude.” It may be, Smith thinks, that performing cunnilingus offended men because the act would be seen “as submitting to women” and therefore a betrayal of Athenian patriarchy. Or maybe Ariphrades had become too much of a rival. Smith became curious, too, about the deletion of Ariphrades from literary history: Not even a fragment of his work remains. “He was eradicated,” writes Smith. “To me, that’s a signal that he was important in some way we don’t understand.” Through research and interviews with experts, the author concludes that “the transgressive challenging of cultural and societal norms through sexuality, might be the only legacy Ariphrades leaves us.” He skewered “the aristocracy, the ruling class, the status quo,” and he seemed to have no need for convention. "We need to cultivate enthusiasms like his,” Smith claims. “We need more people to go down on each other.”
A racy, raunchy, entertaining reimagining of ancient Greece.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-951213-34-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Always illuminating, Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along.
The U.S. poet laureate details her unlikely path to poetic renown.
The latest in the publisher’s Why I Write series could also be seen as an illumination of “how I write” and “why it matters.” Harjo, who previously chronicled her life in Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, offers 50 vignettes that serve as signposts and steppingstones, showing how she began her artistic “venture…as an undergrad student at the University of New Mexico, a single mother with two children (and sometimes three), who went to school full-time, starting out as a pre-med major with a minor in dance, and changing the first year to studio art, my original career intent.” That was a half-century ago, and readers will be fascinated to learn how poetry, performance, song, Native culture, and an unparalleled work ethic came together to inform her artistic journey. “I worked long hours with my research position at American Indian Studies, and my full-time slate of classes, and the day-to-day childcare….I’d stay up nights painting and drawing, and then poetry elbowed its way in, when I thought I had no more room,” she writes. “My long nights then became a tug-of-war between poetry, artwork, and figuring out how my little family would make it on nearly nothing.” Harjo’s tone is both modest and inspirational as she focuses on the process of writing poetry, or “catching light in the dark.” She describes her work as not necessarily a choice but rather a calling she could not resist pursuing. The author examines how her Native identity and legacy have informed her writing and how the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s shaped it, imbuing it with even stronger energy and urgency. She also describes poetry she first heard on the jukeboxes of the Southwest and how jazz became an important influence, as well.
Always illuminating, Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-25703-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
This is the edition that serious students of the Civil War, and Grant’s role in it, will want. Indispensable.
A new edition, with thorough commentary, of the memoirs of an American Caesar—and indeed, a book long reckoned to be America’s version of The Gallic Wars.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1855) began his military career without much promise but distinguished himself in combat in the Mexican-American War, where, as he recounts, he came into contact with many of his future opponents in the Civil War. His legendary service in the Western theater of operations, and later as commander of the entire Union Army, led to his election and re-election as president, but all that did not save him from being bilked by a business partner—and thus this memoir, which none other than Mark Twain convinced him to publish to provide for his soon-to-be-widow, since Grant was already ill with cancer. As editor Samet (English/West Point; No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post–9/11 America, 2014, etc.) notes, rumors immediately emerged that Twain had ghostwritten it. In fact, Grant labored endlessly on this massive book, which, writes Samet, “is the artifact that does justice to his achievement as the leader of an army that preserved a nation and emancipated four million people.” Grant’s writing is simple and unadorned, though those who read between the lines will see that he is nothing if not politically astute. His account of the political troubles of William Tecumseh Sherman for offering the same mercies as he had to the vanquished Confederate forces is a model of understatement—though, he adds, “the feeling against Sherman died out very rapidly, and it was not many weeks before he was restored to the fullest confidence of the American people.” If anything, Samet might be criticized, gently, for being too vigorous in annotation; an early disquisition on the French and Indian War, for instance, is orders of magnitude longer than the aside of Grant’s that prompted it, and it begs to be reined in. Nonetheless, for Civil War buffs, this is a must-read.
This is the edition that serious students of the Civil War, and Grant’s role in it, will want. Indispensable.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-244-0
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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