For Price’s many admirers and those new to his work alike, a worthy addition.
Bursts of on-air intelligence from the distinguished novelist.
Invited by a radio producer to recount a memory of Christmas past, Price (Letter to a Man in the Fire, 1999, etc.) caught the radio bug, and began to contribute short essays for NPR to broadcast whenever the news was slow. “For each piece aired,” he writes, “I’d receive a sum of money that would buy dinner for two at a modest good restaurant.” While hardly lucrative, the work, he continues, was beneficial to his larger career as a writer: it forced him to trim his already lean prose to fit into three- and four-minute slots, and to honor deadlines. This collection gathers a year’s worth of weekly columns that are, in the main, indeed lean—and full of strikingly well-told little stories. One is that Christmas memoir, which recounts an unexpected gift from a Roman beggar and is a marvel of verbal economy; another offers a fond portrait of the endlessly interesting, ancient doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about whom he writes, “to sit two feet from a smiling vital woman whose mind could leap from a Georgetown dinner in the late 1960s to the frozen Delaware and the Father of our Country in 1776 was a salutary shock”); others drop names—Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan, Ingrid Bergman—shamelessly, but more still honor Price’s unfamous relatives and ancestors and other citizens innocent of celebrity. Just a few of the pieces seem hurried and obligatory, among them an unremarkable complaint about the humdrum business of the book tour and an anti-television screed tailor-made for a fund drive. The occasional clinker aside, though, most of Price’s radio bits, like the commentaries of fellow NPR denizen Andrei Codrescu, translate well onto the printed page and hold up to repeated readings.
For Price’s many admirers and those new to his work alike, a worthy addition.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0369-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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