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READINGS

Name: READINGS
Author: Sven Birkerts
ISBN: 1-55597-283-7

by Sven Birkerts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999

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Apart from a few purely literary digressions, Birkerts (English/Mount Holyoke Coll.) continues to pluck at the nerve he first touched with his bibliophilic, anti-technology The Gutenberg Elegies. Collected from such literary venues as Ploughshares and the Hungry Mind Review, as well as more mainstream magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, these essays, whether on current biography, ecocritical literary theory, or Robert Lowell’s posthumous reputation, usually have in common that elegiac tone that Birkerts has made his speciality. The author gloomily surveys from a literary viewpoint the terrain of cyberspace and the information society that have already been mapped out by cultural critic Neil Postman, neo-Luddite Theodore Roszak, and others. Birkerts’s take on the Internet and the 500-channel world is not new, or even well grounded (he freely admits to not using a computer or e-mail). His appeal to books’ power to hold and shape the imagination, however, lends some ballast for his curmudgeonliness. His discussion of American nostalgia and its entropic fate is much easier to walk through as it is accompanied by signposts from Updike’s “Rabbit” books, and while his “States of Reading” reaches familiar conclusions about the activity, it gets a boost from Italo Calvino and Saul Bellow. Unsurprisingly, Readings also reveals a hearty professorial dislike for fashionable trends in fiction and literary theory—in “This Year’s Canon,” Birkerts drives a nail into the coffin of postmodernism with positively 19th-century gusto. Other essays are straight-from-the-lectern Eng. Lit. talks’such as his close reading of Keats’s “To Autumn” and his examination of The Great Gatsby—or easily digested reviews of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Even when reviewing DeLillo’s 800-page bestseller, however, Birkerts casts his essay in the dying light of literature. Pessimists about book culture will find plenty of simpatico musings; others had best check their optimism beforehand.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-55597-283-7

Page Count: 274

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S <i>SPEAK, MEMORY</i>
by Sven Birkerts

- BOOK REVIEW
CHANGING THE SUBJECT
by Sven Birkerts

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OTHER WALK
by Sven Birkerts

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.