A sharp eye, brave intellect, and satisfying writing make this worth a look even for those who don’t usually read essays.
A prismatic exploration of the complexities and contradictions of close relationships.
Readers of Morano’s Grammar Lessons (2007) will be eager to get their hands on this gifted essayist’s second book, and they won’t be disappointed. The first book was set during the author’s year in Spain, and the theme of its widely admired title essay—the frustrations and complexities of love—is again the throughline here. In addition to romantic love, Morano also delves into family love, teacher-student love, best-friend love, and other varieties of less-categorizable love. The deeply immersive pieces about growing up—“Breaking and Entering,” “About Wayne,” “Boy Crazy,” and particularly “Evenings at the Collegeview Diner”—create the feel of a memoir, with the author’s relationships with her mother, who briefly explored lesbianism in mid-1970s blue-collar Poughkeepsie, and with her best friend at the center. “All The Power This Charm Doth Owe” both completes the mother-daughter story and introduces Kevin, the author’s great love. Other standouts include “Crushed,” a funny, fearless, and relatable exploration of a teacher’s crush on a 12-year-old student, and “Like Love,” a travel vignette that displays Morano’s skill in this genre. Oddly enough, the least compelling essays are about “regular” romantic love. “The Law of Definite Proportions,” about a frustrating platonic relationship, is less resonant and probably should not have opened the collection. “Ars Romantica (Or a Dozen Ways of Looking at Love)” is interesting formally but drags a bit. Here and elsewhere, Morano handles death as a footnote or an aside, an aesthetic choice that suggests an emotional style analogous to other writers' choices to rely on black humor or obsessive focus. In general, the author’s prose evokes her experience of the world with clarity and power.
A sharp eye, brave intellect, and satisfying writing make this worth a look even for those who don’t usually read essays.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5598-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of...
A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father.
“In all probability,” writes financial historian/biographer Chernow (Titan, 1998, etc.), “Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and lasting impact than many who did.” Indeed, we live in a Hamiltonian republic through and through, and not a Jeffersonian democracy. Many of the financial and tax systems that Hamilton proposed and put in place as the nation’s first treasury secretary are with us today, if in evolved form, as Chernow shows; and though Hamilton was derided in his time as being pro-British and even a secret monarchist, Chernow writes, he was second only to George Washington in political prominence, at least on the practical, day-to-day front. The author wisely acknowledges but does not dwell unduly on Washington’s quasi-paternal role in Hamilton’s life and fortunes; unlike many biographies that consider Hamilton only in Washington’s shadow, this one grants him a life of his own—and a stirring one at that, for Hamilton was both intensely cerebral and a man of action. He was, Chernow writes, a brilliant ancestor of the abolitionist cause; a native of the slave island of Nevis, he came to hate “the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves”—a dichotomy that influenced his views of ordinary politics. He was also constantly in opposition to things as they were, particularly where those things were Jeffersonian; as Chernow shows, Hamilton had early on been “an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, Native Americans, and Jews,” but became a crusty conservative near the end of his brief life (1755–1804), perhaps as a result of one too many personal setbacks at the hands of the Jeffersonians.
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer’s art.Pub Date: April 26, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-009-2
Page Count: 802
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.
Famed for such chillers as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson reveals a warm, witty side in her voluminous correspondence.
There’s still an edge to the hilarious domestic vignettes she sends her parents, clearly the raw material for the now less famous magazine pieces collected in Life Among the Savagesand Raising Demons: Tending to four rambunctious children while cranking out the magazine pieces and novels on which the family income depended was a perennial challenge. Husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor at Bennington for most of his career, never made much money, and his urgings to Jackson to get back to work form a disquieting undercurrent to the generally cheerful letters. The earliest letters are her lovestruck missives to Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University, but an angry letter from 1938 reveals a darker side to their relationship, delineated in more explicit detail 22 years later. Her anguish over his unrepentant womanizing and habit of demeaning her in public while ignoring her in private makes a heartbreaking counterpoint to delightful portraits of family activities that also ring true but tell only part of the story. The dark side so evident in Jackson’s fiction is kept for her work, but we see its origins in a 1938 letter to Hyman declaring, “you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i [sic] hate this whole human race as a collection of monsters.” Jackson’s avoidance of capital letters adds to her correspondence’s charmingly idiosyncratic flavor, though she adheres to more conventional punctuation in letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt, which offer candid snapshots of a working writer’s life. Later letters chronicle without self-pity the years of declining physical and emotional health that preceded her untimely death at age 48 in 1965.
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13464-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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