More fine brushes with the rank and splendor of everyday life from Pickering (The Blue Caterpillar, 1997, etc.). Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it a more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived. “The stories I tell are stationary. The narratives don’t teach or inspire.” Dozy and comfortable as they are, his essays also urge readers to preserve the clarity of the moment, to stop looking for meaning and significance under every rock, to get of their duff, take a walk. Here are a dozen of his pieces, all Brownian and witty and melding fiction with nonfiction (he insinuates a homespun cast of characters from Carthage, Tenn.—a motley crew of the halt and the lame—as counterpoints to drive opinions home, as with “I prefer bright lies to drab truth.” One essay finds him summering in Nova Scotia, spending brambled days with a restless wife and two dogs that never get the drift about porcupine quills. In another, it is autumn and Pickering is at the losing end of a collision with a swimming pool wall, shaking loose intimations of mortality. There is a tour of irritability, the result of falling and breaking a few ribs (his wife, inured to his bumbling, greets him at the door with “My God! What have you done now, you asshole?”); and there is a celebration of crotchetiness prompted by the doldrums of February. These are all stories of the commonplace, but in Pickering’s hands they rise like yeast, a chemistry of clever writing that teases oblique pleasure from the mundane.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8214-1234-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
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
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