Although Baker sometimes strains when he directly addresses his concerns and predilections, it takes a rare combination of...
Showing off Baker's Sears catalog eclecticism and word-playfulness, this collection is congenial kin to his thoughtful, fiddly novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature rather than the garrulously oversexed Vox.
These essays and other "lumber" (in its English sense) show off Baker's ideas of scale and subject matter, loosely categorized under rubrics the likes of "Thought," "Machinery," and "Library Science." In Baker's fastidiously discursive approach, the more obscure or minute the subject—such as model airplanes, nail clippers, punctuation marks, slang terminology, or typos—the longer and deeper he goes. His entertaining piece on the movie projector focuses on the transition from reel-to-reel projectors to the modern oversized platter systems, then zooms in on the crucial Maltese cross, the tiny, remarkably precise moving part that drives both. In a lighter study he deciphers and itemizes the books used by upscale furniture companies as props in their mail-order catalogs. An article on the history of punctuation fixes such picayune marks as the ancient cryphia or the medieval pilcrow within the history of Western writing. The collection's two longest pieces reveal the tensions and complements of his antiquarianism and gadget-mania: respectively, cyberspace's on-line library catalogs and the etymology and literary history of the word lumber. In the former, Baker sometimes loses his perspective in the debate over card catalogs versus Boolean-search-driven databases, jumbling nostalgia and practicality. The latter is, at 140 pages, an indulgent tour de force, and also a metaphor for eclectic learning, as he browses through Pope, Johnson, Webster, etc., for lumber's meanings.
Although Baker sometimes strains when he directly addresses his concerns and predilections, it takes a rare combination of wit and effort to seem this facile without actually being so.Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43932-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
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