In 1894, at age 35, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, officer, father, and husband, enjoying success after many years of study, devotion, and discipline, was unaccountably arrested for high treason and thereby became a symbol—as victim to some and traitor to others— of the imperfections in French military justice and the precarious position of Jews in French society. Now, after at least a thousand studies, novels, plays, and films of what came to be known as ``the Dreyfus affair,'' Burns (History/Mt. Holyoke) offers perhaps the first comprehensive study of Dreyfus the man, and of his family. The Dreyfus family history is typical of French Jews. Culturally assimilated after Jews were emancipated by the Edict of 1791, the Dreyfuses found financial opportunity in industry (textiles) and social status in the military, where young Alfred's intelligence, discipline, and methodical nature were rewarded with promotions, an appointment in Paris, and his marriage to a wealthy young Jewess, Lucy Hadamard. Without warning and without cause, however, he was arrested for treason on the basis of an unsigned document in someone else's handwriting, convicted in an irrational judicial process (he believed his crime was being a Jew), publicly humiliated, and deported to Devil's Island, where he spent five years in solitary confinement before his brother won his freedom with the confession of the true spy. Knighted in 1906, Dreyfus championed various working-class causes, served along with his son in WW I, and lived to see the scandal revived in the anti-Semitism of the 30's, finally dying in 1935, having outlived nearly everyone else involved in the affair. Because he was so undemonstrative—he ``lived,'' as his son said, an ``intense interior life''—Dreyfus remains inscrutable, even as the focus of such a carefully documented and analyzed study as this. And with minimal theorizing and offering little cultural context, the virulence of the anti-Semitism that trapped Dreyfus remains unexplained, as does his failure—refusal?—to become the martyr his followers wanted him to be. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016366-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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