This long-awaited second volume completes the definitive biography of the great Romantic; it illuminates how, in the course of great struggles with the demons of addiction and despair, the poet became a philosopher. Many of Coleridge’s contemporaries saw him as an indolent, impecunious, opium-addled political turncoat, issuing wild literary pronouncements while urging that the government prosecute the Napoleonic wars abroad and persecute the English radicals—his erstwhile allies—at home. All this was true enough, Holmes shows. Yet he also shows how Coleridge struggled to overcome his passions with the consolations of philosophy. From a vast array of journal and notebook entries, letters, table talk, and later reminiscences, Holmes assembles a convincing history of the tortured interior life of the thinker who, had he never composed his epochal verses—“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel”—would still stand as the presiding genius of the Romantic movement. Holmes details Coleridge’s tempestous relationship with Wordsworth, his unhappy marriage, his unrequited love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, his propensity for drink and laudanum, his horrible bowel ailments, and the disastrous disregard for publication deadlines that left him poor and underpublicized. But the focus is on Coleridge’s indomitable imagination and on the enthusiasm that his ideas generated in friends, like Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, in enemies, like William Hazlitt, and in younger writers like Keats and the Shelleys. Holmes steers his reader through all the moments of crystalline brilliance that eddied out of the stream of Coleridge’s life, while giving a full sense of the messy turbulence of his existence. His critical readings of Coleridge’s verse and prose are pointed and judicious; psychological speculation is clearly marked and kept to a minimum. In a way, Holmes himself needed to speculate little, given the plethora of revealing fantasies scattered through his subject’s poems, prose, notebooks, and monologues. An original among modern egomaniacal geniuses, Coleridge is an ideal subject for biography; yet while he would seem an inexhaustible subject, Holmes’s masterful volumes will probably take at least a generation to digest. (Volume One, Coredidge: Early Visions: 1772—1804, is being simultaneously reissued in trade paperback by Pantheon.)
Pub Date: April 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43847-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
A welcome pinprick in the bloated hot air balloon of management advice–should accompany The 8th Habit or Raving Fans in the...
A necessary icy dash of pessimism in the warm sea of feckless optimism that is the business management genre.
Like Machiavelli's The Prince or Swift's Gulliver's Travels, this parody of "Business Inspiration" contains more verisimilitude on one page than does an entire library penned by Steven Covey. Remaining a shadowy figure throughout, Kersten looks out from the author photo–rendered as a Wall Street Journal pen-and-ink portrait–with a heavenward gaze that rivals that of Ralph Reed seeking divine guidance. Credit him with the ability to couch the actual facts of most business organizations in jargon that even a Ph.D. would understand. Kersten’s essential point is that most businesses, seduced by the pernicious myth of the "Noble Employee," waste precious time and ungodly sums of money attempting to transform mediocre wage slaves into superstars. This is wrongthink, he avers. Not only can you not teach a pig to sing, but in so attempting, you sacrifice a lot of bacon. Passive, dependent, unmotivated employees are easier to exploit and require relatively low maintenance. Accordingly, managers who spoil employees by boosting their self-esteem are only contributing to employee narcissism. Employees must be put squarely in their place–in Kersten’s world, this falls somewhere between medieval serfdom and indentured servitude. Radically demotivating employees includes such techniques as creative amnesia–"forgetting" employees’ names and contributions; also, managers should respond impersonally to employees, refraining from sharing or engaging in eye contact or emotional displays. Kersten even advocates physical "cleansing" after employee contact–make sure to apply antibacterial liquid after an employee handshake.
A welcome pinprick in the bloated hot air balloon of management advice–should accompany The 8th Habit or Raving Fans in the same manner that The Wealth of Nations should accompany Das Kapital.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 1-892503-40-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A ramshackle biography of the legendary jazz innovator. Gourse (Madame Jazz, 1995, etc.) has researched Monk's life thoroughly, interviewing his surviving family members and musical cohorts, as well as combing the archives for contemporary profiles and reviews of his work. Sadly, however, there's insufficient narrative thread here to stitch together Gourse's assemblage of quotes. Monk grew up in New York City; by 1934, when he was 16, he had dropped out of school to devote his full attention to the piano. After touring the country with a gospel group, he returned to New York and began experimenting with his uniquely personal tonal and rhythmic language, often identified as the essential ammunition of the bebop revolution. While Monk profoundly influenced Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, it wasn't until the late '50s that his seminal gigs at Manhattan's Five Spot garnered him full public recognition as a musician and composer. He was equally famous for his eccentricities: Generally late for his performances, he often left the piano and danced around the stage, letting the ever-changing members of his quartet supply the music. In private, Monk was notoriously taciturn, and occasionally he would experience episodes of complete withdrawal that required his hospitalization. Gourse entertains the idle speculations of many nonexpert acquaintances about the causes of his behavior, but the conclusion she seems to support—possible extensive use of unspecified drugs, complicated by genius—is vague. And about Monk's music the author offers silly tautologies like, ``In the aggregate, his songs comprised an oeuvre, each a commentary on his unique universe of sound.'' The book's obvious title, already used for a Monk documentary, is a perfect tipoff that Gourse has little to say about her subject that is imaginative or useful. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-02-864656-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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