A piece of hard work, dredged and sifted often to the dregs of misery—but it registers and holds.
Keen, affecting, suspicious, evocative, subtly cool memoir of Birkerts’s first 30 years.
His complex narrative mimics the action of a mind, “juxtaposing past and present, suddenly extracting from beneath some ordinary moment a gleaming root of memory.” Critic and essayist Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies, 1994, etc.) paints the big picture through the slow accrual of vivid portraits and images anchoring all that is forgotten. Son of immigrants (Latvian was spoken at home), as a kid he was unsettled by the contemplation of their homeland’s legacy of concealment and myth, its otherness when held up against life in suburban Detroit. Birkerts goes bone-deep here—wincingly and embarrassingly at times, even when there are intimations of face-saving—to chart the rawness and immediacy of his childhood. Central to the picture is his father, an explosive taskmaster, although “the explosion is nothing compared to the ongoing expectation of the explosion.” Birkerts rebels, in part because everyone else his age is: “We had all, it seemed, tuned in to FM radio at the same time, gotten fired up by the same bands, read the same few books—On the Road, Howl, Naked Lunch, Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up—and now we were linked in broad solidarity against the corrupt and avaricious system of the elders.” He’s not just running with his tribe, though; young Sven is a sharp kid, expectant and self-submerged. He has passion, so when his handful of relationships founder, the knife twists. Thankfully, even at rock bottom, there is reading, which sustained and fortified him, and Joseph Brodsky, a goad more than a mentor to Birkerts’s writing, which through fits and starts finally finds the essay form. His act of excavation here uncovers a man of analytic intelligence who also listens to the logic of his heart.
A piece of hard work, dredged and sifted often to the dregs of misery—but it registers and holds.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03109-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Conor Cruise O'Brien may or may not be ``the greatest living Irishman'' or ``the most important Irish nonfiction writer of the 20th century,'' but he has certainly found a splendid biographer in historian Akenson (History/Queen's Univ., Ontario). Born in 1917, O'Brien could seemingly do everything but math. He supported himself with prizes at university; wrote literary criticism; was on the fast track in the Irish Foreign Office until he jumped off it, carrying out too exactly the unattributable wishes of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjîld; was vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, a New York academic, an Irish Cabinet minister, editor-in-chief of The Observer, and the author of seminal books on Ireland and Edmund Burke. Along the way he became the enfant terrible of the UN, not only revealing in his To Katanga and Back how it worked but doing it in such entertaining fashion that Akenson calls it ``the first successful picaresque novel of postcolonial Africa, but...a novel that is built almost entirely of fact.'' He showed enormous courage in Ireland, denouncing the constitutionally asserted right of the South to exercise jurisdiction over Ulster as ``essentially a colonial claim'' and campaigning ceaselessly against the romanticization of violence. It would be surprising, in a life devoted to journalism and crusades of one kind or another, if O'Brien had not gone off the rails from time to time as he did in the late 1960s: His castigation of Western imperialism as ``one of the greatest and most dangerous forces in the world today'' and his statement that containing communism was one of the greatest dangers to world peace suggest his limitations. But his courage, his honesty, his restless mind, and his eloquent writing assured him of a wide audience, and his States of Ireland and The Great Melody have both been remarkably influential books, the latter, according to Akenson, ``among the great biographies of the 20th Century.'' This, too, is a very fine biography, full of wit, verve, candor, and a critical appreciation of its subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8014-3086-0
Page Count: 563
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Standard entertainment news, with a sad story and some interesting Barr background, from a sibling with an ax to grind. Roseanne's wounded younger sister Geraldine tells her side of the story, from their childhood in Salt Lake City through their 1990 break-up, with Schwarz (co-author of The Peter Lawford Story, not reviewed, etc.) as literary enabler. ``We'' is a very important pronoun in this book. Roseanne and Geraldine dreamed of becoming the Jewish sisters who took Hollywood. In the early 1980s, empowered by sisterhood and ``Sisterhood,'' Geraldine mapped out a ten-year plan to launch Roseanne to stardom as America's Domestic Goddess. Roseanne was the performer in their sister act; Geraldine ``delighted in being backstage...making the spotlight possible for my big sister while never challenging her right to be the sole occupier of its glow.'' They wanted their own sitcom, starring Roseanne as a blue-collar working woman, and including a sister Jackie, a lesbian modeled after Geraldine. The plan was to use humor to advance their feminist agenda and to start a production company that would bankroll other women. But only one of the two overweight sisters was destined to see the Promised Land. In 1990, wildly successful and just beginning her relationship with Tom Arnold, Roseanne fired Geraldine. Soon after, she accused her parents of incest and child molestation. Geraldine, who sued unsuccessfully for some share in Roseanne's take, defends her parents. There were problems at home, she says; their father was sometimes inappropriately angry. But he was, if anything, the source of Roseanne's talent, an ``influence on her delivery and stage presence.'' With the whole story out of her system, Geraldine forgives ``Rosey'': ``May you one day also come to know such peace despite currently being in the midst of a hell of your own creation.'' A Geraldo show waiting to happen, with the laughs courtesy of Roseanne.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-230-4
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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