edited by Sari Botton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013
Variations on a theme with too little variation; Joan Didion said it all and more memorably.
Twenty-seven female authors on their breakups with the Big Apple.
This collection of essays on the theme of leaving New York reads like a manifesto of ambivalence, as the contributors hold forth on the metropolis’s charms and challenges. Unfortunately, the treatment of this theme lapses into monotony, as the observations, both celebratory (the culture, opportunity and excitement) and rueful (the expense, danger and status obsession), are largely uniform across the board. The particulars of the authors’ experiences similarly sound repetitive notes: Sensitive young outsider arrives full of literary ambition and naïve romantic notions about the city only to suffer through a series of tiny, overpriced apartments, humiliating day jobs, romantic misadventures, and senses of dislocation and crushing insignificance. The collection’s title comes from Joan Didion’s landmark essay (not included) on having “stayed too long at the fair,” and this raises the question of whether that famous work examined all that is necessary on the subject. There are standouts, however: Valerie Eagle offers a chilling remembrance of crack addiction, sexual abuse and homelessness, and Meghan Daum’s piece, “My Misspent Youth,” assesses the dangers of romanticizing the New York experience with superior wit and a compelling and original voice. The remainder of the essays—including pieces by Hope Edelman, Maggie Estep, Ann Hood, Cheryl Strayed, Emma Straub, Dani Shapiro and collection editor Sari Botton—while often poetically rendered and emotionally affecting, blend into an undifferentiated stew of bittersweet longing and regret. The writers represented here share so many common stories and feelings about their experiences in New York that perhaps they should have foregone the essays and just formed a support group.
Variations on a theme with too little variation; Joan Didion said it all and more memorably.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58005-494-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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edited by Sari Botton
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
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by John Carey
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by John Carey
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