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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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