by Michael Robbins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017
Robbins prefers his equipment for living abstract, but he can definitely take it straight, a point the book’s concluding...
Are Wallace Stevens and Bob Dylan permanently at odds, or do they have something in common?
For poet Robbins (The Second Sex, 2014, etc.) the answer is probably yes to both; pop isn’t poetry, regardless of what the Nobel Academy might think, but both enthusiasms scratch an itch the other can’t reach. The contrast between the two is the hook on which the author hangs this debut collection of criticism, which doesn’t aim to resolve the dispute so much as to display the intellectual journey of a former Journey fan. Robbins writes hilariously about Neil Young’s apparently awful memoir and informatively about the various types of metal (heavy, death, speed et al.). In a review of Pauline Kael’s work, he nails an essential fact about good critics: they don’t echo your opinion so much as challenge or unsettle it. Robbins himself fails the Kael test where Taylor Swift is concerned; his mash note to her album “Red” likely won’t persuade the uninitiated to at least give it a try. But Robbins is far more astute on poetry than pop, possibly because he’s a practitioner of one and mostly a learned fan of the other. He has an Oedipal wrestle with James Wright and James Dickey and delivers a blisteringly funny attack on Robert Hass that stops just short of being a full-scale demolition job. In the most vital piece, Robbins writes at some length on the poetry of Frederick Seidel, whom the author seems to see as a poet whose upfront tastelessness (about the Holocaust or 9/11) is actually a type of reverse psychology: a way of shocking readers into questioning the value of taste when addressing the horrors of modern life.
Robbins prefers his equipment for living abstract, but he can definitely take it straight, a point the book’s concluding Basho-to-Beyoncé and Beyond playlist makes abundantly clear.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4709-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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by Cheryl Strayed ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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