An expatriate British sculptor's eccentric view of his adopted home of Siena, Italy. Spender is marvelous when he describes the landscape shimmering with heat and layered with history; when he offers an artist's insight into Italian art (``Michelangelo is the first artist who makes us aware that there is as much to be said by not completing a work as by completing it''); when he describes the ancient methods still in use for making olive oil; and, above all, when he offers colorful, sharp, funny sketches of the ordinary people who are his neighbors. His description of playing in the local village band is a high point of poignancy and comedy. Spender bores occasionally, though, with desultoriness: In his wish to avoid writing a standard guidebook, he offers a rambling, highly personal collection made up of this impression, that historical rumination (was Shelley drowned by accident or killed by Italian robbers? What were the Etruscans really like? What were the significant events in the life of Savonarola?) that never quite cohere and that are uneven in their interest. Bewilderment assails the reader with sentences like, ``Art is often a disease that life acquires by contagion,'' and in hints about the author's ``long and peculiar marriage'' and his dalliance—lustful, paternal, unconsummated—with one Vittoria. She's a young Italian woman who appears in the narrative early on with no introduction and accompanies Spender on many explorations, but who's presented only in frustratingly impressionistic glimpses. The fascination she holds for Spender is never accessible to the reader. Spender is at his best when neither dryly detached nor too personal, when he presents the memorable people and the artistic and natural beauties of the region and suggests the tension between craving the privacy of an exile's life and suffering the loneliness of being a perpetual outsider. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-83836-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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