Solid if never thrilling—a shame, given the inherently fascinating nature of the subject.
A noteworthy victim of the Inquisition—not altogether innocent, but a victim all the same—earns homage in this slender, somewhat unsatisfying biography.
Giordano Bruno came of age at a time when the papacy was desperately seeking to retain power and much of Europe was desperately seeking to step free of it. “Super-intelligent and vastly erudite,” as science journalist White (Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, 2001, etc.) cheerfully puts it, Bruno got himself into trouble with Church authorities while a novice seminarian; ratted on by a fellow student, he was caught reading Erasmus in the privy and summarily excommunicated. For the next 20-odd years, then, he wandered from one European capital to another, living off his wits and the largesse of reform-minded nobility. Bruno was never quite a Protestant—he examined Luther’s doctrines and found them wanting, and he could find no safe haven in Calvinist lands, where a fellow Catholic dissident had been slowly roasted on suspicion of heresy—but, especially after he began poking in Gnostic texts, he was never quite redeemable as a lapsed Catholic, either. All of which makes it a deeply curious turn of history that Bruno decided to return to Italy in the hope of mending fences with the “relatively liberal” Pope Clement VIII, who, though interested in Bruno as an intellectual specimen, nonetheless allowed the Inquisitors to have their way with him. And so they did, as White writes, torturing Bruno for six years and then burning him at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. White’s account of these events is marred by a considerable amount of hedging and guesswork—understandable, given that the Church’s records of Bruno’s imprisonment have disappeared—and by a tendency to dumb down Bruno’s doctrines (as well as to overlook key texts such as the Cabala of Pegasus). Still, he does a good job of placing Bruno’s revolt in the freethinking context of the time, of showing the injustice of Bruno’s fate, and even of showing the relevance of Bruno’s ideas to the subsequent development of higher mathematics.
Solid if never thrilling—a shame, given the inherently fascinating nature of the subject.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018626-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
In a dramatic memoir, Sexton (Private Acts, 1991, etc.) offers her account of life with suicidal poet Anne Sexton. This highly personal account complements Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of Anne Sexton, and even textual overlaps can be intriguing. For example, Middlebrook places one of Anne's suicide attempts near Linda's Harvard dormitory room but across from the office of Barbara Schwartz, then Anne's therapist. Here Linda simply omits Schwartz from the scene, thus highlighting her own importance to the story. One of Linda's primary themes is in fact her attempt to extricate herself from her mother's dependence on her. The childhood scenes Linda paints (including seeing her mother masturbate) most often terrify her and her younger sister, Joy. Anne's depression and instability make a poor match for her husband's volatility: She taunts him, and he beats her as the children look on. Writing with the immediacy of the present tense, Linda notes than when Anne spanks her, ``she never counts. She just does it till she isn't angry anymore.... I hate her. I hate me.'' Linda responds to such chaos by imposing order in her own small ways, eating precisely one piece of Halloween candy each day or tidying the house her mother ignores while she writes. Linda even tries to take care of her mother, but it is not until she reaches high school that they become friends: ``At last she seemed to like me.'' As Linda matures, she learns about writing, particularly from Anne and her friend Maxine Kumin, but she also struggles to free herself of her mother. Even after Anne's suicide, Linda finds her life linked to her mother's, most directly in her work as literary executor, but most disturbingly in her own struggle against depression and her battles to maintain her equilibrium when dealing with her own children. In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family. (Photo insert, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-78207-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Great idea: Take one of America's top jazz singers, who also happens to be a good writer (Traps, the Drum Wonder, 1991), and have him write about the singers and musicians who influenced him. Unfortunately, the end result is disappointing and frustrating. TormÇ had the good fortune to grow up in an era of great singers, songwriters, arrangers, and instrumentalists. More important, it was also an era of live radio broadcasts and increased fidelity in recording techniques. As he makes abundantly clear in this text, the phonograph was his conservatory, with radio serving as a practicum and the movies and Broadway as sources of extra-credit assignments. As a result, the influences on his musical style range far and wide, from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald to Mabel Mercer and sax players Georgie Auld and Gerry Mulligan. In the book's best moments, he deftly describes a singer's style in a few quick brushstrokes; his descriptions of Louis Armstrong on a bandstand or Crosby at a mike are little gems that capture a moment and a style. However, too much space in this slender volume is wasted on biographical data or irrelevancies like a long list of people who dubbed vocals for Hollywood's non- singers. TormÇ is capable of better, more extended analysis, as the excellent section on the underappreciated Lee Wiley shows. He is also a pretty fair prose stylist, despite a glaring mixed metaphor in his discussion of Richard Rodgers, whose ``iron-clad melodies...stuck to your ribs.'' That sounds like a painful experience indeed. This book would have been much better if TormÇ had concentrated more on the music.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509095-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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