Biographer Morris (Ambrose Bierce, 1995, etc.) explores Walt Whitman’s relationships with family, friends, soldiers—and ultimately with America—through the context of the Civil War.
Morris raises the curtain on Whitman’s life in early 1861, portraying the poet as trapped between his career (producing journalistic hackwork to support his memorably dysfunctional family) and his milieu (living an unsatisfying bohemian life with New York’s literati). The advent of the Civil War and the subsequent enlistment and wounding of Whitman’s brother moved him to rush to the military hospitals around Washington, DC. Although his brother’s wound was slight, Whitman’s exposure to the other soldiers’ humble dignity (in spite of their extreme suffering) inspired him to spend much of the remaining war years comforting the wounded with visits and small gifts. Visiting battlefields, easing the soldiers’ physical pain, and suffering along with them all had a profound effect on Whitman and helped to reconnect him with the universality of the American experience. While Morris’s study is well-researched and beautifully written, his biographical readings of Whitman’s poems are of limited use. Morris effectively integrates the poetry into his narrative, demonstrating the redemptive effects of the war experiences on Whitman’s personal life. Unfortunately, Morris fails (particularly in his consideration of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) to place his insights within the larger context of Whitman scholarship. Support from the well-thumbed body of Whitman criticism would have provided much-needed credibility to his purely biographical literary criticism. In spite of this drawback, however, Morris deftly balances general historical sources with insightful selections of correspondence and poetry to construct an important addition to the body of Whitman scholarship.
The most engaging and complete work on Whitman’s Civil War years to date.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-512482-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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