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ABOUT MY TABLE AND OTHER STORIES

Like much of Delbanco's full-length fiction (Stillness, Sherbrookes, etc.), these nine stories are intelligent, readable, well-meaning—yet lacking in depth, drama, or texture. In almost all the pieces, the focus is on a man nearing 40, usually married, usually the father of a beloved daughter; the man recalls an old flame, or considers the similarities between his dead mother and his young daughter, or muses on time and transience. (In "Traction," the man hurries home from a business trip to be with his daughter after her hip operation: "His baby lay in a hospital bed; he would tell her on arrival, though she would not comprehend him, how the world is in an orbit and ail-things are therefore circular.") Unfortunately, however, though Delbanco gives each of these men different names, ethnic backgrounds, and occupations (lawyer, doctor, insurance broker, academic), they are blandly interchangeable—and uniformly fuzzy; even a tale involving the discovery of infidelity fails to invest this persona with vividness or specificity. (Flattest of all is the essay-like title story—a meditation, dedicated to the late John Gardner's memory, on the unexpected deaths of friends: "Death visited him nightly. It comes when it will come. It could be a furnace malfunction, allergic reaction, rabid bat, oncoming drunk in a van in his lane, suicide, undiagnosed leukemia, handgun in a shopping mall, pilot error, stroke, the purposive assault of some unrecognized opponent, earth, air, water, flame.") And the few sparks of narrative urgency here come from some of the more interesting personalities who cross this central persona's path: in "The Executor," the hero (a frustrated artist) reluctantly inherits the papers of a late, semi-distinguished painter; in the similar "Northiam Hall," a would-be biographer goes to England to start research on the poet Harold Emmett but abandons the project ("Emmett's teaching had been suicide; he was better left alone. We each must learn to die; exampling helps only a little"); and in the faintly amusing "Ostinato," a tired notion—a husband's infidelity with the au pair girl—is given a bit of a bounce via the girl's oddly worded letters (she's Japanese) to both husband and wife. Mildly involving, never-disturbing short fiction, then: sentimental, wistfully thoughtful, undistinguished.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983

ISBN: 0688021573

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983

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IN MY PLACE

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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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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