A lively Vonnegut-esque social critique that pretends to be esoteric buffoonery.
This encore anthology of misanthropic writings offers another dose of satirical drama, essays, illustrations, asides, and a print-your-own Ph.D. diploma.
In this work, Reneau (MisAnthropology: A Florilegium of Bahumbuggery, 2003) includes four absurd “conversations” (dramas), “pontifications” (essays), and sketches by Mexican political cartoonist Rogelio Naranjo. The diverse subject matter includes the O.J. Simpson trial reimagined in the form of an opera, and a sci-fi drama with a gender-bending married couple intent on populating a planet. In his essay “The Perils of Satire,” Reneau discusses the risks and rewards of the form, saying “a ‘bad’ argument against the cause you promote can perhaps be more effective than a ‘good’ argument in favor of it.” He follows this up with “The Bugby Legacy,” a satirical guide to running an organized religion as an ultra-successful business. The book is peppered with various caricatures—like the bombastic news anchor Yam Snosnibor— who go blithely about their business, unaware of their human foibles. Playful buffoonery, clever wordplay, and ridiculous antics serve to lampoon humanity and religion. Reneau’s tone is prevailingly lighthearted. “We hitched a ride on a tedious trek to this turkeyhole in the sky?” asks a character who has just spent millions of light-years traveling to a new home. Readers should feel as if they are in on the jokes, even if some of the 50-cent words and creative language can be overwhelming: “Our task is to entice negotiables from the wallets of the illiterati, and convince these yokels that they will want to be able to comment knowingly on this Pillar of Western Literature at their water cooler or sewing circle.” The occasionally digressive conversations debate the American justice system and the First and Second Amendments. Reneau also tells jokes about various groups and icons, including the NRA and Abraham: “He was stopped from consummating this cockamamie deed when an angel of Yahweh suddenly appeared in the nickotime and assured this obedient idiot, who was just following orders, that he was only kidding.”
A lively Vonnegut-esque social critique that pretends to be esoteric buffoonery.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9729549-1-4
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Donlazaro Translations
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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