More a nightmare than a dream, the Tangier that Green (a senior writer for People magazine) depicts so vividly here attracted an international collection of expatriate artists, writers, aristocrats, disaffected rich and their parasites, lovers, criminals, addicts—all drawn by a free-money market, inexpensive living, and a permissive atmosphere. In 1947, Paul and Jane Bowles, talented writers, homosexuals, and married—``famous among the famous,'' as Gore Vidal claimed, but otherwise unknown—found a refuge in Morocco's exotic blend of worldly pleasures, decadence, spirituality, and occult. Over the next 40 years, they were joined or visited by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, New York intellectuals, European aristocrats, and American heiresses such as Barbara Hutton and her various consorts. While rioting and civil upheaval brought independence to Morocco in the 50's, the sybaritic expatriates, their activities only partly curtailed by new restrictions, wandered about the Casbah, Casablanca, Marrakech, and the Sahara, gathered periodically at the Parade bar, exchanged sexual partners, experimented with drugs, and created an entire culture of their own, hallucinatory and brutal, where deviance, eccentricity, extravagance, even insanity were the norm. Here Burroughs, living in a male brothel he called ``Villa Delirium,'' wrote ``routines'' that his friends, particularly Ginsberg, gathered into Naked Lunch, and Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky, an autobiographical fiction that remained a cult novel until popularized by the 1990 film version that Bowles narrated. Working from letters, book reviews, and conversations, Green captures the pace, vitality, and immediacy of a good gossip, and the dynamics of time, place, people, and style that comprise cultural history. She also offers an enlightening context for the 1989 Malcolm Forbes birthday party that drew Henry Kissinger, William Buckley, and Barbara Walters to this ``depraved Eden'' at the end of the world. Entrancing history, then—and there is a great novel to be made of all this.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016571-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.”...
The writing life at age 85.
In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy….” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me….For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544287044
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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