A thoroughly researched, somewhat scholarly investigation of Austen’s oeuvre for devoted Austen fans with some background in...
Biographer Byrne (Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth, 2016, etc.) explores Jane Austen’s passion for the theatre and the influence of comedic plays on her writing.
In this updated edition of her first book, originally published by an academic press as Jane Austen and the Theatre, Byrne focuses on the theatrical world of the late 18th century, providing a broad history of the playwrights and the theaters of that time as well as an overview of the performances that Austen attended. The performances served as a source of inspiration for the private family theatricals of Austen’s youth and closely influenced her early attempts at playwriting and fiction and eventually her novel Mansfield Park. In later chapters, Byrne examines how Austen’s knowledge of theatrical technique and use of dialogue played an essential role in building effective scenes and developing characters in all of her novels. The author’s updates of her previous book, geared toward drawing in nonscholarly readers, include an introduction assessing Austen’s increased popularity over the past two decades and, in the final chapter, “Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood,” assessments of the many film and theatrical adaptations of Austen’s work that have captivated audiences over the past century. These include A.A. Milne’s play Miss Elizabeth Bennet, numerous versions of Pride and Prejudice, and the outrageously subversive updating of Emma as the film Clueless, and Byrne evaluates which have proven most successful on their own terms. This chapter, though perhaps more accessible for contemporary readers of Austen, represents a departure from her more scholarly arguments. Ultimately, she writes, “the key difference between the merely escapist and romantic screen renditions of Jane Austen and those that truly succeed as works of art in their own right is the adaptation’s truth not to the letter of her text…but to the spirit of her comedy. The spirit, that is, which she herself learned from the comedic theatre.”
A thoroughly researched, somewhat scholarly investigation of Austen’s oeuvre for devoted Austen fans with some background in literature.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-267449-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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