Massive (800 pp.) and excellent first volume of a projected two-volume biography by Boyle (German/Cambridge) of the protean genius Goethe. Writing for a general audience as well as scholars, Boyle opens with a carefully constructed historical context to show the Goethe was an anomaly in the age named after him: an elitist during an age of democratic revolution; a classicist during a period of sentimentalism; a man who secularized art and experience during a period of religious revival, grounding his knowledge in observation over theory and tradition-which led him to reject Newton as well as the received beliefs of Christianity. Each chapter is divided into life, events, nonliterary activities-such as Goethe's study of science (geology, botany, and physics)-and an analysis of related literary works, the lyric poems, The Sorrows of Young Werther (more a reflection of the taste of the age than Goethe), the classical plays, and the evolving Faust. The unifying theme is Boyle's belief that Goethe was motivated by unfulfilled goals, usually women but also an idealized life in Italy-which he ultimately visited at age 36, when from the shores of Venice he saw the sea for the first time. In spite of his self-image as Promethean creator, solitary, suffering, desolate, he became a cultural icon in Weimar, turning the ancient republic, where he had gone to be tutor to the Prince and rose to be Prime Minister, into a haven for the artistic and intellectual elite. At age 40, the handsome, charming, and seductive womanizer-after a long courtship with a married woman and many abandoned peasant girls-took responsibility for the son he fathered by the 23-year-old Christina Vulpius, whom he married 16 years later. This clear, methodical, dispassionate representation of Goethe is especially timely given the tumultuous social and intellectual changes in contemporary Germany, its reunification and cultural reassessment reminiscent of Goethe's lifetime.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: O-19-815866-1
Page Count: 763
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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