Delightful, enchanting, and learned.
A jolly good nostalgic walk through Housman country.
British poet Ted Hughes described Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) as “the most perfect expression of something deeply English.” He could also have been describing Housman’s greatest work, the poetry collection A Shropshire Lad. In this capacious, generous work of literary and cultural history, Parker (The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, 2009, etc.) sets out to prove Hughes’ statement. In 1896, when Housman, then 37, was a professor of Latin, he self-published 500 copies of his small volume of 63 poems. In its first year, it sold only 381 copies in Britain and the United States combined. Because he wanted to make it affordable, Housman declined all royalties. By 1911, it had sold 13,500 copies and has never been out of print, becoming “one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the language.” George Orwell claimed to have memorized the whole book when he was at Eton. Parker describes it as a “gazetteer of the English heart.” The author first offers a lengthy, affectionate biography of Housman, comparing him to Thomas Hardy, “another writer who straddled the Victorian and modern ages.” Housman composed much of the book while taking long, solitary walks in Hampstead Heath, and it was inspired by his unrequited love for a fellow university student, Moses Jackson. Parker next takes on the English landscape, explaining why Housman chose Shropshire for his setting. For Housman, it “was our western horizon, which made me feel romantic about it.” After a fascinating disquisition on the popular association of walking and poetry, Parker shows how extensively the poems influenced English music—e.g., Vaughan Williams, Morrissey and The Smiths—and how the book became an important companion for English soldiers. The author concludes by providing numerous examples of Housman’s and the poems’ appearances in modern culture (Inspector Morse, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons) as well as the complete text of A Shropshire Lad.
Delightful, enchanting, and learned.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-17304-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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