Levi's tact, good sense, respectful insight, and talent for the telling detail would have won even the heart of Tennyson...
Acknowledging his debt to Robert Bernard Martin's Tennyson (1980), Levi (formerly, Poetry/Oxford Univ.; The Frontiers of Paradise, 1988, etc.) dispels the biographical fog emitted by Tennyson descendants, apologists, and idolaters, and—in a relatively brief but penetrating analysis—reveals the man behind the icon, the poet laureate whose odd appearance and eccentric behavior distanced him from the intimacies his fame encouraged.
Tennyson (1809-92), the fourth of 12 children, was born into a parsonage family beset by madness, addiction, and melancholy. He published his first poems with his brother when he was only 18, and, by 1850—in spite of recurrent depression, fits of wandering, excessive drinking and smoking, misguided idealism, and equally misguided medical treatment for various hypochondriacal illnesses—he'd become the most popular poet in England, a status he achieved largely through In Memoriam, an epic elegy to his late friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. He spent many years dithering with Idylls of the King, a 12-book poem that combined the fashion for medieval romance with contemporary social criticism, and that captured the voice and values of England—industrial, competitive, moralistic, pious, sentimental, and nostalgic—in hundreds of poems, each characterized by his talent for felicitous turns of phrase. Tennyson married a 37-year-old who bore him two sons, one of whom was to write his biography; his friends included Wordsworth, Arnold, Browning, Carlyle, and, after he became poet laureate, even Queen Victoria, who forgave his crusty manners because he could deliver on time the occasional verse she required. Throughout, Levi skillfully sketches Tennyson's background (the chaotic undergraduate life at Cambridge), recounting many vignettes (Tennyson riding on the first steam railroad train) and anecdotes (the poet among his many siblings, eating dinner, courting).
Levi's tact, good sense, respectful insight, and talent for the telling detail would have won even the heart of Tennyson himself, whose special aversion was biographies.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19662-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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