Ruffin (English/Sam Houston State Univ.; New and Selected Poems, 2010, etc.) offers a collection of personal essays that read like script ideas rejected by the Farrelly brothers.
Though the author boasts a fairly impressive Southern Lit CV—founding director of Texas Review Press, founding editor of the Texas Review and 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate—most of these essays are just offensive and miss the mark. They find great humor in excessive drinking—Ruffin devotes an entire piece to his history with alcohol and lubricates others—and many of the essays celebrate a sort of arrested adolescence, especially with women. The author ogles teenaged waitresses and watches a mosquito probing a thigh of “a beautiful young woman” sitting next to him at a reading—guess what the probing reminds him of? Ruffin dismisses women who don’t turn him on, including one waitress to whose apparently unsavory looks he devotes an entire paragraph. The author also displays an infantile pleasure in the body’s waste products; One essay is entirely about our multiple uses of the word shit; another records his mother’s (!) eccentric practices with her used Kotex. Throughout, the author oddly reveals a disdain for the Southern and Southwestern people whom he putatively celebrates. One mean-spirited essay ridicules the doggerel written by some law-enforcement officers at a convention—a bit like a martial-arts expert’s flattening some eager movie fan in line to see The Karate Kid. Ultimately, this collection reveals the author’s inability to know what’s important and what isn’t. An interminable essay about a flight in a cargo plane features pages of ain’t-goin’-nowhere-in-particular dialogue and crude comments about women’s body parts. Essays for the drunk and disorderly. Ruffin should stick to poetry and fiction—see The Man Who Would Be God (1993) or Jesus in the Mist (2007).
Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57003-986-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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