Playfulness and gravity mix with quotations and creation in this mélange of styles, tones, and textures.
A veteran novelist and teacher of creative writing offers a salmagundi of ideas for the latest volume in the publisher's “Why x Matters” series.
The author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction, Delbanco (Curiouser and Curiouser: Essays, 2017, etc.), who has taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, Columbia, and the University of Iowa, among others, returns with a series of diverse arguments to support the title. He begins with a section about teachers who influenced him (both on and off the page), focusing on John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and he later notes the popular decline of the Johns and the rise of Baldwin. Delbanco then examines five texts that, he argues, have been enduring influences on “our daily behavior,” including The Communist Manifesto, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he explores the concepts of originality, plagiarism, and imitation. Among the most original writers, he writes, are Flannery O’Connor and Virginia Woolf. Throughout, Delbanco offers comments about the history of writing and why it is so significant, and he laments the decline of truth in language (Donald Trump receives stern words). Interwoven into the narrative are playful and instructive moments for readers, and the author makes frequent use of famous quotations to support his arguments. In fact, the text is chockablock with quotations—some identified, some not (among the latter, “world enough and time” from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”). Delbanco has a lot to say about teaching and offers some long—sometimes overlong—sequences about a writing seminar (with lengthy offerings by students) and eight pages devoted to the reproduction of a course syllabus he used for many years with his creative writing students.
Playfulness and gravity mix with quotations and creation in this mélange of styles, tones, and textures.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-24597-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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