Blackwood comes across as a breath of fresh—if bizarre and spooky—air, an unfettered character that Ashley captures well but...
British Mammoth anthologist Ashley (The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, p. 1252, etc.) resurrects the wildly creative Algernon Blackwood, a master of dread and the spine-shudder.
Now forgotten, Blackwood (1869–1952) was roundly hailed in his day as a genius of horror and supernatural fiction. Ashley brings him back to prominence by giving close and intelligent readings of his work, focusing on such classic stories as “The Wendigo,” “The Willows,” and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” Much of that work was produced on the fly while Blackwood, an incessant traveler, was traipsing around Europe, America, and Canada. Ashley follows in his footsteps, exploring the gradual unfurling of Blackwood's communion with nature, his exploration of haunted houses, his fascination with esoteric beliefs. Blackwood’s associates at any given time, Ashley suggests, had a fascinating impact on what he was writing. His sense of the wider world can be gleaned from his dealings with various theosophical societies and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group intrigued by Western hermeticism, Hebrew magic, and the Kabbala, introduced to him by W.B. Yeats. Ashley also conveys Blackwood’s perception of how his stories acted on the imagination with well-chosen quotes: “My idea,” the author declared in 1915, “has been to describe the sense of Wonder which, beginning with Fancy, leads on to bigger wonder which is Spiritual; and, incidentally, to show the wonder of common things.” Though his work was never a great success in the theater, radio and television were natural venues for Blackwood, whose bass voice worked wonders with the often macabre and always otherworldly nature of his stories.
Blackwood comes across as a breath of fresh—if bizarre and spooky—air, an unfettered character that Ashley captures well but thankfully doesn't tether.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0928-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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