A mixed bag, then: some good moments, but mostly unsatisfying.
Lackluster travels in the nation’s lower quarter.
In his best moments, Heldrich (Arts and Sciences/Univ. of Washington, Tacoma) serves up affecting essays about little-visited places out on the prairie and desert where he communes with the spirit of Willa Cather, ponders the meaning of rodeos and gun shows, and drinks a lot of beer. He blends nicely observed vignettes (a cracker-barrel philosopher too drunk to pronounce “epistemology,” the precise makeup of the garbage below a Kansas overpass) with pleasing allusions (his book may contain the only application of a John Ashbery poem to a dusty New Mexico back road), and he gets in some affectionate fun-poking at cultural commonplaces Out West: cowboy boots, cheap motels, college football. Yet Out Here suffers from a certain heavy-handedness: Heldrich is too fond of insisting that, unlike him, the rest of America is blind to the virtues of the outback (“They seem to have an implicit fear of the land, an anxiety of separation, of being too far from the mall”), and he’s too quickly given to cloying exaltations (“Whenever I bite into a tortilla, I can’t help but think I’m connecting with the age of the great Maya and Aztec cultures before the continuing Conquest”). Heldrich also seems unaware that the wandering-the-byways-to-deliver-social-criticism (and, yes, exaltations) trope has been done before, and much better, by the likes of Ian Frazier, Edward Abbey, and William Least Heat-Moon. (His idea that the Okies went to California to be fashionable suggests that he should brush up on John Steinbeck’s work, too.) When he turns to the inevitable, things get even worse; an essay on Las Vegas, always an easy target, is a below-average evocation of a place that has earned a whole library of bad writing, and a piece on Disneyland, an easier target still, is staggeringly trite.
A mixed bag, then: some good moments, but mostly unsatisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-922811-61-X
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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