An uncritical assemblage of information about six famous writers and how they spent the years of fascism's rise and WW II. These portraits do little more than juxtapose summaries of the subjects' careers with hackneyed chronologies of the war. A wide middle ground of context and interpretation seems missing between the writers' own accounts—the diaries and letters Sonnenberg largely relies upon—and the rote unfolding of history. With Hemingway and Ezra Pound, life and war are inherently intertwined, but others test the foundation of Sonnenberg's project. The detachment of Virginia Woolf and the adamant passivity of Colette are curious but don't bear the tedious recounting given here. Apart from his abortive stint as a war correspondent, Steinbeck comes off as irrelevant to such a study. After a detailed account of Pound's increasingly wild behavior through the war years, his ``Pisan Cantos'' simply appear, deus ex machina, as transcendent art; Sonnenberg has little to say about how they emerged from what came before. Most odd is Sonnenberg's cultish adulation of Thomas Mann as both an artist and an anti-fascist. Her literary analysis is mostly plot summary, decorated by useless adjectives of praise, like ``awesome''—in Mann's case, piled so absurdly high as to give the whole book an unsettling cast of eccentricity. Propped up here and there by phrases about artists' relationship to their times and their societies, the studies do not spring from, nor do they produce, much coherent thought about such things and are even startlingly contradictory: Colette's ``neutrality'' is explained sympathetically, but Sonnenberg later declares that ``one either opposed fascism with all one's might or one became a swarmy [sic] accomplice.'' Trite in style as well as content, this resembles nothing more than a series of overgrown book reports. (b&w photos not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57488-013-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
Not everything you wanted to know, and probably some you didn't (or didn't know you wanted to know, or were afraid to ask because someone might be offended, like ``What was so great about the Inca?''). But for people whose only link with Latino culture is the occasional enchilada, Cuban-born journalist and lecturer Novas lays it all out. From Montezuma to Tito Puente, from santer°a to bacalao, Novas offers a nifty (if glib) blend of history and pop culture (did you know that Desi Arnaz's ``Babaloo'' was a ``song to the Yoruba deity Babalu''?). Perhaps best of all, she offers help with the all-important question facing p.c. gringos (and if you are benighted enough not to know who they are, Novas will tell you that, too): Is it more correct to say ``Hispanic'' or ``Latino''?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-452-27100-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Reworking a book first published abroad, Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin) provides readers in these United States with a useful overview of their cultural history. The narrative presents American creative endeavor as gradually increasing in scale and growing more integrated into the world. Crunden (American Salons, 1992, etc.) begins with ``local culture,'' looking in turn at Puritan Boston, Enlightened Philadelphia, and the Virginia of the Founding Fathers. Discussing the subsequent era of North, South, and West, he shifts his emphasis from culture's religious and political dimensions toward the fine arts. Especially strong pages treat Washington Irving and John James Audubon. Somewhat scanting the Civil War, Crunden moves quickly to a discussion of the national culture that found progressives and pragmatists tempering capitalist excesses. Mini- biographies—e.g., of William and Henry James, of Alice Hamilton- -convey much information. Paradoxically, the emergence of international modernism crowns Crunden's narrative of the specifically American. Charles Ives and Frank Lloyd Wright, we find, were following European leads by formalizing indigenous national styles. The author further gestures toward an apotheosis of the American with a final section on ``cosmopolitan culture.'' A profile of William F. Buckley Jr. nicely encapsulates the emergence of a ``conservative hegemony,'' while an examination of T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction as exemplary post-60s literature works surprisingly well. Crunden represents contemporary academic thought by rehashing David Lehman's denunciations of Paul de Man and followers—this is a letdown in the wake of his superb account of transatlantic intellectual exchange around the time of the Second World War. But this history aspires to start, not finish, debates over coverage; its risky choices work to stimulate rather than to conceal. Leavening common information with uncommon insights and skillfully managing—without directly addressing—the difficulties of its mission, Crunden's work should provoke fine conversations on what Americans might want to say next.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55778-705-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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