Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.
Thoroughly researched biography of Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who shocked his contemporaries with raw, gritty fiction.
Sorrentino (English/Virginia Tech; editor: Stephen Crane Remembered, 2006, etc.) faced challenges in writing this biography: mainly, previous books that perpetuated errors and lies and few sources to set the record straight. His study chronicles the personal and literary struggles of a controversial writer who vowed to live “a life of fire.” The youngest son in a large family of precociously intelligent children, Crane refused to follow in his father’s footsteps as a minister, instead hoping to train at West Point for a military career. However, his plan was deflected by an older brother’s advice to enter a mining-engineering program at Lafayette College. There, and later at Syracuse University, Crane was a mediocre student, preferring to drink, smoke, play poker and carouse with his fraternity brothers; he finally dropped out and moved to New York City, intent on becoming a writer. While barely supporting himself as a journalist, he finished a novel drawn from the life he observed in the city’s slums: “the bleak portrayal of a naïve, sentimental girl in the tenements of New York.” Unable to find a publisher for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane published the book himself, winning praise from writer Hamlin Garland and influential editor William Dean Howells. The novel, Sorrentino writes, was “the first significant example of literary determinism in American literature,” but its candor and pessimism made critics wary of reviewing it. Three years later, though, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane’s psychological study of a Civil War soldier, generated adulation and fame. Good fortune was short-lived, however; bad business decisions and “questionable ethics” eroded what he earned, and Crane’s last years were fraught with financial troubles. He kept writing, always hoping for a fresh start, until tuberculosis killed him at the age of 28.
Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04953-6
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.
Writer, producer and director Rae, famous for her popular Web series, "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl," channels her humor and attention to detail into this eponymous collection of personal essays about all the embarrassing moments that have made her who she is.
Sharp and able to laugh at herself, the author writes as if she's unabashedly telling friends a stream of cringeworthy stories about her life. Having grown up with the understanding that laughing at and talking about people was a form of entertainment and bonding, Rae continues the tradition by inviting readers into her inner circle and making her own foibles her primary focus. Almost 30, she opens up about nearly everything in her life, from her lifelong fear of being watched while eating in public to acutely awkward experiences with Internet dating and cybersex. The theme that race plays in this book is integral, although Rae's approach, as with all of her subjects, is decidedly humorous and lighthearted; she veers, always, toward a personal tone as opposed to one that's political or polemical. Her unwavering candidness, the sheer energy of her voice and the fact that she clearly finds herself to be terrific material make her a charismatic, if occasionally exasperating, narrator worth rooting for. Having been in a committed relationship for seven years, Rae unpacks how her Senegalese parents’ union contributed to her attitude (indifference) toward marriage. Some readers will find her proclamations and direct confessions offensive and be turned off; others may be offended but laugh out loud anyway. In Rae, her audience has landed on a singular voice with the verve and vivacity of uncorked champagne.
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749051
Page Count: 210
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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