"Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration." Fussell, who sounds in his wittier moments like S. J. Perelman turned professor, is too much the tenderfoot and ben vivant for exploration, and he heartily loathes tourism. But, ah, travel! In Fussell's idealistic, embittered view, travel is a supremely humanistic activity, and never more so than when the traveler is a gifted writer, conscious of the past and capable of translating the myths of heroic adventure and pastoral romance into terms of wagon-lits and steamships (not jet planes). Fussell identifies the Twenties and Thirties as the last great age of literary travel, and in this knowledgeable, elegant study he celebrates it and laments its passing. Taking up where The Great War and Modern Memory left off, Fussell chronicles the explosion of travel from Britain after the depressing confinement of WW I: D. H. Lawrence to Italy, Graham Greene to Africa, Peter Fleming to China and Brazil, Auden and Isherwood to America and elsewhere, Robert Byron to "Oxiana," Evelyn Waugh to Abyssinia, etc., etc. Fussell doesn't limit himself to spirited appreciations of their work. He also neatly illuminates the genre, connecting it to his authors' native eccentricity, individualism, and distrust of authority (he memorably defines the traveler as "a hypertropied freak of British empiricism"). Best of all perhaps, he puts his criticism in a colorful personal frame, by relating his own doomed comic-romantic attempts at travel in a world ruled by tourism. In this irascibly lyrical vein Fussell is as good as the people he writes about—which is very good indeed.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1980
ISBN: 0195030680
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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