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HOUSMAN COUNTRY

Name: HOUSMAN COUNTRY
Author: Peter Parker
ISBN: 978-0-374-17304-3

INTO THE HEART OF ENGLAND

by Peter Parker ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017

Delightful, enchanting, and learned.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)