by Mark I. Lurie ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 2018
A well-written, comprehensively researched account of one man with connections to key players in literature and politics...
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A biography of a lesser-known figure of 20th-century literature, written by his distant cousin.
In this debut biography, Lurie takes readers on a journey through the life of his father’s cousin Lewis Galantière, who mingled with Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway in 1920s France, translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s works into English, and was part of the trans-Atlantic literary scene. In an effort to provide an accurate account, Lurie sorted through a variety of contradictory information and outright lies. Galantière had a tendency to embellish his academic credentials (as a literary critic who never attended college, he claimed a fanciful intellectual history) and reinvent his personal history (he said he was born in France rather than to Latvian immigrants in a Chicago tenement). With lengthy quotations from both Galantière’s writings and the papers of the historical figures he interacted with, Lurie builds a detailed portrait of a challenging man who aspired to distinction and—though he had frequent successes—often fell short of his own goals. The book seamlessly blends Galantière’s professional adventures—with publishers, the Federal Reserve, PEN International, and Radio Free Europe—with his personal life, including multiple marriages and affairs. A detailed notes section expands on many of the topics covered in the book and also provides a way for Lurie to incorporate anecdotes that do not fit into the primary narrative, adding further color and interest to Galantière’s story. The book’s one noteworthy shortcoming is a disinclination to grapple with some of its subject’s less savory traits—in particular, the Jewish Galantière’s occasional anti-Semitism, which Lurie describes but does not explore. On the whole, however, Lurie has produced a substantial, thoughtful biography of a man previously known only through his appearances in the papers of more famous individuals, acknowledging his contributions and placing him in historical context without attributing undue significance to a relatively minor figure in modern intellectual history.
A well-written, comprehensively researched account of one man with connections to key players in literature and politics throughout the 1900s.Pub Date: April 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991002-2-6
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Overlook Press LLC
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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