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AMERICAN AUDACITY

Name: AMERICAN AUDACITY
Author: William Giraldi
ISBN: 978-1-63149-390-4

IN DEFENSE OF LITERARY DARING

by William Giraldi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018

A host of detailed, thoughtful, often rancorous reviews haunted by a love/hate relationship with American letters and...

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A midcareer retrospective of essay-length literary reviews.

Giraldi (The Hero’s Body, 2017, etc.) identifies the thrust of his critical work to date, of which this volume offers an extensive sample, as preoccupied with articulating the boldness and originality he finds peculiar to the American literary tradition, his own contributions included. Like many emerging writers with literary aspirations, the author seems compelled to join the fray over the Great American Novel and to scrutinize his writerly inheritance from the pedigreed lineage of the white, male, quasi-religious American canon. An unapologetic literary snob who lionizes critics as cultural arbiters, Giraldi enlists in a crusade against bad writing and celebrates the role of criticism as policing the borders of literary legitimacy. He sallies forth against the “commercial fiction” of bestsellers like Tom Clancy’s “lobotomized” “poli-sci porn” and the “eighth-grade gurglings” of Fifty Shades of Grey. The secret to such blockbuster success, Giraldi reckons, is to “never ask your reader to delve with you into the wombs of language, to rappel into the inky caves of connotation.” The author alternates reviews of giants like Melville and Poe with the handful of lesser-known 20th-century novelists—Barry Hannah, Allan Gurganus, Padgett Powell—he most esteems. Though the dense verbiage of his book reviews often recalls an academic’s tone, and he is fiction editor for a campus literary journal (AGNI at Boston University), Giraldi writes for an educated generalist audience and claims to detest academia. He rails in particular against the “unreadable prose” of academics written for other academics, counting himself lucky to have escaped the drudgery of the “tweeds” whose writing on writing he declares “incapable of giving pleasure.” Still, he assumes the academic mantle of metareviewer, critiquing critics like Stanley Fish, Lionel Trilling, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom with grad-student gusto.

A host of detailed, thoughtful, often rancorous reviews haunted by a love/hate relationship with American letters and replete with choice tidbits from the author's commonplace book but offering few original or illuminating insights.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63149-390-4

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HERO'S BODY
by William Giraldi

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLD THE DARK
by William Giraldi

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.