translated by Paul Auster & by Jean-Paul Sartre & translated by Lydia Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1977
This collection of four essays (1971-73) and three interviews (1971-75) by Sartre assumes additional, touching significance with his revelation that because of blindness his "occupation as a writer is completely destroyed." Nobel Prize winner and, in the opinion of most, the Frenchman of Letters since 1945, Sartre is not concerned in his last essays with the literary and philosophical matters upon which his reputation rests. Rather, he fulminates with unrelenting outrage at instances of political oppression—most effectively, in an impassioned jeremiad against the attempted cultural genocide of the Basques by Franco-Spain. The other essays discuss the failure of traditional electoral politics, the nature of justice and the state, and the Maoist movement—in particular as they affect the French; but Sartre's Marxist alternative clearly intends international correspondences. Of the French Maoists he writes, "they realized that the old bourgeois society was doomed and was only protecting itself from death with the clubs of policemen"; moreover, they "had shown that the only relationship possible between the ruling class and the masses was a violent one." Unfortunately such phrases are closer to pamphleteering propaganda than to the subtle formulations usually associated with Sartre. Nowhere does he plausibly demonstrate the validity of his pronouncements, or convincingly detail the means by which proletariat class-consciousness will extend to the bourgeoisie and lead eventually to the socialist end he envisions. The interviews, however, bristle with intellectual vigor: Sartre's restive preoccupations as a man and writer, autobiographical reflections and reappraisals, a tartly provocative consideration of the woman's movement with Simone de Beauvoir, his latest views of his monumental study of Flaubert, and much more—these further expose one of this century's most formidable minds.
Pub Date: April 15, 1977
ISBN: 0394734602
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
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by Paul Auster ; photographed by Spencer Ostrander
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
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)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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