Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither “official” nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.
A masterful biography of the canonical modernist.
In this first of a proposed two-volume life of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Crawford (Modern Scottish Literature/Univ. of St. Andrews; On Glasgow and Edinburgh, 2013, etc.) examines the poet’s youth and early career, ending with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait. Eliot was the seventh child of a wealthy St. Louis family whose provincialism he was determined to escape. Drawn to poetry even as a teenager, he fell into “an intense engagement” with the 19th-century Romantics. At Harvard, where he was a mediocre student, he discovered the French symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue, whose poems possessed “a compulsively insinuating music” that Eliot began to imitate. Not surprisingly, he yearned to go to Paris, a plan his doting, overprotective mother sternly discouraged. Nevertheless, in 1910, Eliot sailed for Europe, enrolling in classes with the groundbreaking sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychologist Pierre Janet and philosopher Henri Bergson, thinkers who stimulated Eliot’s ideas “about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism, and hysteria in ‘primitive’ and modern life.” In 1914, he again left America, this time for a year at Oxford that proved life-changing: He met Ezra Pound, who responded to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with exuberant praise. Pound opened doors, and by 1920, married, living in London, editing and reviewing while working full-time at a bank, Eliot had become “one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing.” Crawford illuminates Eliot’s tormented first marriage to the volatile Vivienne Haigh-Wood; his complicated relationships with Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf; and his struggle to find an American publisher. Most crucially, he explores the swirling aesthetic and philosophical forces that shaped Eliot’s startling poetry.
Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither “official” nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-27944-8
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of...
A lively, candid memoir from person-in-the-news Daniels.
The author is a household name for just one reason, as she allows—adding, though, that “my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump.” So it is, and not without considerable effort on her part. Daniels—not her real name, but one, she points out, that she owns, unlike the majority of porn stars—grew up on the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home with few prospects, but she is just as clearly a person of real intelligence and considerable business know-how. Those attributes were not the reason that Trump called her on a fateful night more than a decade ago, but she put them to work, so much so that in some preliminary conversation, he proclaimed—by her account, his talk is blustery and insistent—that “our businesses are kind of a lot alike, but different.” The talk led to what “may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” The details are deeply unpleasant, but Daniels adds nuance to the record: She doesn’t find it creepy that Trump likened her to his daughter, and she reckons that as a reality show host, he had a few points in his favor even if he failed to deliver on a promise to get her on The Apprentice. The author’s 15 minutes arrived a dozen years later, when she was exposed as the recipient of campaign hush money. Her account of succeeding events is fast-paced and full of sharp asides pointing to the general sleaziness of most of the players and the ugliness of politics, especially the Trumpian kind, which makes the porn industry look squeaky-clean by comparison.
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of lessons on taking charge of one’s own life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20556-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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