Like his poetry, Levine’s essays are generous, honest, and real.
One of our finest poets recalls a life well lived in poetry.
A former American Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Levine (News of the World, 2009, etc.) was in the process of finishing this sparkling collection of essays and lectures when he died (1928-2015). His good friend and fellow poet Edward Hirsch helped to complete the project. In the title piece, which Hirsch calls “one of the great textured descriptions of a writer finding his vocation,” Levine describes in loving detail discovering a group of fellow aspiring poets at Detroit’s Wayne University, where he read and wrote poetry with a small group of enthusiastic, like-minded undergraduates. “Where would I have been without all of them”—the poets he discovered and the friends “who shared with me their faith in the power of the perfect words.” In a piece on the influence his “master,” Williams Carlos Williams, had on his early career, Levine acknowledges that Williams’ poems, written in the “spoken language of my country,” turned him away from his “English masters toward the effort to create a poetry original and audacious enough to be American.” Great poets don’t always make great teachers. Levine attended the University of Iowa in the fall of 1953 and took Robert Lowell’s class. Lowell taught “badly,” and students started dropping out. John Berryman, on the other hand, captivated the students: “Never again would I encounter so great a poem [by Dylan Thomas] so perfectly presented.” The book is full of scintillating remembrances of fellow poets. Berryman could be “both brilliant and candid,” but Thom Gunn had “an ‘aura,’ a sort of inner beauty that was manifest in all of his actions.” Levine also speaks lovingly of his “mentor and friend” George Hitchcock and his seminal literary magazine, kayak,” and his piece on little-known Roberta Spear, who died young, will have readers rushing to her work.
Like his poetry, Levine’s essays are generous, honest, and real.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49327-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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