Charming Daly (Feminist Ethics/Boston College; Pure Lust, 1984; Gyn/Ecology, 1978, etc.) gives us her side of the story in this ``account of my time/space travels and ideas.'' Daly has always dispensed pretty strong medicine, and in the last few years seems to have opened her own sanatorium: This book employs the same fractured vocabulary and inverted syntax that she established as her lingua franca in Gyn/Ecology. We are taken through the four ``spiral galaxies'' of Daly's life: the first encompassing the period from her birth in 1928 to the publication of The Church and the Second Sex some 40 years later; the second concentrating on the early 70's, when Daly renounced her Catholicism and became a ``Revolting Hag'' bent upon overthrowing patriarchy; the third carrying her deeper into the fray through the increasing extremity of her opinions as they developed up to 1987; and the fourth bringing her into the present/future. What rescues this from complete opacity is Daly's willingness to illustrate every new turn in her thought with some personal incident—usually something that occurred on holiday or with one of her cats—and to return frequently and vehemently to the bitter experiences of her childhood and youth to explain her intellectual genesis. Moreover, the most lurid passages of Dalyese (``Having arrived at the Moment of participation in the Background Present, we Unfold our wings and soar into an expanded Present which is off the calendars, off the clocks or clockocracy'') sound a good deal more congenial when held against the flatness of her ``normal'' prose (``I landed in Paris and was filled with wonder and ecstasy at every sight and sound. This was all like a fairy tale, and it was happening to me''). There is a ``Great Summation'' of sorts at the end, which doesn't really clear things up. Nothing new for Daly fans, and little help to Daly scholars: Like all good preachers, Daly reveals very little of herself in the end.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250194-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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