Humorist O'Donnell (The New Yorker, Spy, etc.) presents a dizzy little satire and a miscellany of literate fun in diverse modes. Without shame or remorse, the author has his way with the English language, committing several assaults and a battery or two on a defenseless Mother Tongue. For example, ``Vertigo Park,'' an aborted real-estate development (so named in a mistaken stab at suggesting lush greenery) was ``the gateway to tomorrow, since the future is only the present left to run wild.'' One of the players in this long title story appears in a dubious flick called Will Wanda Never Cease?. There's playboy Culvert Booney and ``prestigious Leeward College, whose motto was Stand and Mingle.'' Add a scourge known as Fatal Urogenital Carnal Kinesis, which ``claimed its victims without any right to such claims.'' Maybe this is O'Donnell's attempt at The Great American Novelette, with its youthful romances, malefactors of some wealth, politics at the highest level, and pervasive all-American silliness. Maybe not. Wisely, he also presents a clever drama—sort of a Joycean play, playing on words—and a Bunyanesque tall tale about Johnny Business, who could sell feathers to a fish, retail, and his secretary, Babe the Blue Blood. There's the story of Bitty Borax, girl detective, who could postulate speedily—a modern Jonah tale wherein ``the crew and most of the passengers were superstitious under their clean clothes,'' and, as they say, more. The gathering is not large but it's inventive. Sometimes it invokes the spirit of Benchley, sometimes Perelman; then it's Bob and Rayish or Woody Allenish. Finally, it's the work of a comic chameleon, whose parodies smirkingly lurk in the verdant flora of the language. A small collection, sometimes silly, mostly funny, written with verve of steel. Send more japes, O'Donnell. (Cartoons throughout, hand-drawn by the author.)
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40040-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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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