THE SELECTED LETTERS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL

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THE SELECTED LETTERS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL

Name: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL
Author: Nicholas Griffin
ISBN: 0-395-56269-4

VOL. I, THE PRIVATE YEARS, 1884-1914

edited by Nicholas Griffin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 1992

A brilliant psychological portrait, annotated and explained with tact and sensitivity.

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An "epistolary biography'' comprised of a selection of Russell's previously unpublished correspondence—mostly love letters to his wife, Alys, and to Ottoline Morrell, a married Bloomsbury courtesan—discussing his work, education, women's rights and his own priggish morality.

Griffin (Philosophy/McMaster Univ.) clearly appreciates both the cerebral "logic machine,'' as Russell called himself, and the lonely, confused, passionate lover. Descended from eccentric, politically powerful aristocrats and orphaned at an early age, Russell (1872-1970), over the objections of his grandmother, married an American Quaker five years his senior—the subject of many letters. Fearful of perpetuating the madness that had haunted both of their families, the couple avoided children but feared contraception, which Russell believed had caused his father's epilepsy. Still, the first ten years of his marriage were his most "fruitful'' as a mathematical philosopher. They were followed by ten years of dutiful devotion to his emotionally fragile wife—whom, impulsively, he had decided he didn't love. Russell did love the elusive Ottoline, however, whom he wooed with long daily letters, over one thousand of them. During a year in America, he found a cure for the gum disease that had made him repugnant to Ottoline—and he fell for another woman, 28-year-old Helen Dudley, who, as this collection concludes, was on her way to England to marry him and to bear the children he longed for. The great names are all here: Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, Gilbert Murray et al., with their brilliant minds, high causes—and dysfunctional lives. And, as these letters so pitifully reveal, Russell's strength as a philosopher—his abstract, unyielding, insular nature—prevented him from achieving the intimacy, children, and romance he craved.

A brilliant psychological portrait, annotated and explained with tact and sensitivity.

Pub Date: July 15, 1992

ISBN: 0-395-56269-4

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE YEAR OF DANGEROUS DAYS
by Nicholas Griffin

- BOOK REVIEW
PING PONG DIPLOMACY
by Nicholas Griffin

- BOOK REVIEW
DIZZY CITY
by Nicholas Griffin

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A REVOLUTION IN THREE ACTS
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
WILLIAM GOLDING
by John Carey

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MASSES
by John Carey

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SLEEPERS

by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995

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An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)