Maybe Prisoner of Sex revitalized Mailer for detractors as well as admirers, but you don't have to be a feminist to put this book down. Indeed, it needs no down-putting — it devolves by itself into banality, vacuity and general sludge. It's a collection of Mailer's occasional pieces from the last five-odd years. The subjects range from such prefabricated micro-Hemingway efforts as boxing and a Lorca translation to attempts at revenge or self-justification vis-a-vis the critics, e.g., the claim that New York critics' taste determines what is produced and mutterings about what a fine book the ever-maligned American Dream is. Mailer of course not only ventured into play writing during this period but undertook some film ventures; this book reminds us how fast the "free run of obscenity" lost its shock value, and Mailer's writings on the movies give little evidence of any other kind of value. Despite his relatively straightforward journalistic efforts on the Kennedy assassination and Mark Lane, and the moderate essence of "black power," the final message of the book is about Mailer himself: it invites the conclusion that he's afraid to try sustained, disciplined work. This comes through indelibly in his accounts of movie-making, of the big novel he was going to write in these years, and of his New York mayoral campaign which seems to have lacked tactics, strategy, or any theory beyond the trendiness of local community control. Thus the undertones of envy in his piece on Podhoretz and Making It (probably the most interesting thing in the book) in which he exhibits admiration for Podhoretz' frank sense of purpose and will to success. In contrast to this stands Mailer's own "existentialism" — not the big-E kind but something close to the philosophy of the traveling salesman who thinks existentialism means God-is-dead-do-what-you-want — from that vantage point it's hard to generate artistic commitment or even, as in the case of this collection, bellelettristic accomplishment.
Pub Date: April 17, 1972
ISBN: 0451054229
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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