Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.
No moral lessons, just gorgeous language and vibrant voices lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays.
So argues Canadian multihyphenate Gilbert (a novelist, playwright, and founder of a gay theater in Toronto), who also argues that “the recent intrusion of the woke left into aesthetics…threatens to destroy art.” This mindset, he states, has transformed artistic works into vehicles for didactic and/or propagandist ends. In this collection of essays, Gilbert, working from the premise that the analytical, “left brain cultural takeover” began during Shakespeare’s life, analyzes how the Bard’s plays and poems reveal a rejection of reason and empiricism. He begins by observing that Shakespeare’s writing style is as complex as it is heavily connotative, which he sees as atypical for an era when most writers followed one of three styles: “grand, middle or low.” Indeed, the Bard often adopted a variety of styles within single passages of text. His stylistic “slipperiness” extends to how he played arguments and counterarguments against each other to create works “steeped in paradox.” That, Gilbert suggests, marks Shakespeare’s plays as amoral and the playwright as a skeptic. He further argues that the playwright’s commitment to rhetoric and language before all else placed him in a position where he could simply allow his characters to speak and act rather than use them to reveal any particular social or political bent. Working during a time when theater was under attack by Puritans, who favored plays that moralized, the Bard chose instead to follow a Classical aesthetic grounded in the thinking of philosophers like Gorgias, who believed that “what is real is defined by the artist in collaboration with the audience.” Shakespeare, then, was not only a literary craftsman but also an early modern aesthete dedicated to creating beauty rather than delivering messages for the ages. This view of Shakespeare is hardly new, but its application to today’s woke culture is stimulating, if not necessarily persuasive.
Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771839037
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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