An intelligent but somewhat stolid life that captures (but is also imprisoned by) its hero’s enigmatic nature.
It has been over 30 years since the last biography of Metaphysical poet Marvell, and Welsh poet Murray takes full advantage
of the intervening research in his new life of this intensely private yet highly public man. Marvell was a mercurial figure, a tempestuous man in a turbulent age, a poet and pamphleteer, a controversialist and a member of Parliament. Yet even given new information uncovered in the past three decades, little is known about long stretches of his life and career. Indeed, as Murray ruefully admits at one point, we cannot even be entirely sure of the pronunciation of Marvell's surname. Some things are certain, though. Marvell was a Puritan minister's son, born on March 31, 1621, educated at Eton, orphaned at 19 when his father drowned. Because, like so many men of letters of his era, he could not hope to support himself by writing, he found employment, after a period of about four years abroad, as a tutor to the children of the well-to-do. Both before and after his election to Parliament, he wrote verse and, eventually, prose; ironically, his topical prose writings were the mainstay of his reputation throughout his lifetime and for most of the century after his death in 1678. His poetry began to receive something like its current recognition only in the early 19th century. Murray's portrait of Marvell reveals a clever, gifted man who was willing to do whatever was necessary to survive the swift-running currents of the Cromwell era and the Restoration, yet a man of bedrock integrity. The author's analyses of the verse are workmanlike, if uninspired, and his grasp of the complexities of the period is impressive. The result is a solid popular biography of a secretive figure, bedeviled by the clouds of mystery still surrounding its subject.
An intelligent but somewhat stolid life that captures (but is also imprisoned by) its hero’s enigmatic nature.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24277-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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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