Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.
The Great Gatsby floats on a limpid river fed by myriads of autobiographical, cultural and historical tributaries.
Churchwell (American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities/Univ. of East Anglia; The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, 2004, etc.) has written an excellent book on a novel that remains a favorite in English courses in American high schools and colleges. Surprisingly, she even manages to find fresh facts that escaped previous scholars, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s own published comments about his novel, a book that, as Churchwell notes, neither sold well nor received uniformly favorable reviews. Churchwell weaves together a variety of strands: a summary of the novel (including its earlier drafts), a biographical account of the years Fitzgerald was working on the novel (including the time he and Zelda were living and partying in Great Neck, near the novel’s setting), and an account of a sensational New Jersey murder case in 1922 (the year that Gatsby takes place), an investigation that resulted in arrests and a trial but no convictions. Churchwell also digs deeply into the architecture of the novel—looking, for example, for the relevance of specific details Fitzgerald mentions. She also examined Simon Called Peter, a novel that Nick Carraway picks up early in Gatsby; she read countless New York newspaper and magazine files looking for items in 1922 that may have found their way into the novel (car wrecks, wild parties and the like). She haunted the rich Fitzgerald archives at Princeton and elsewhere and, employing the clarity of hindsight, chides most of the early critics who missed what Fitzgerald was up to. At times, Churchwell attempts Fitzgerald’s lyrical style—one chapter-ending sentence alludes to “the vagrant dead as they scatter across our tattered Eden”—she’s earned the right to play on his court.
Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-474-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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