A fine summation of Kittredge’s excellent body of work.
A gathering of essays, mostly autobiographical, by the poet laureate of the Inland Empire.
Kittredge (The Willow Field, 2006, etc.) was in his 30s when he decided that he wanted to leave the family ranch in the desert of southeastern Oregon, earn a degree and become a writer. “An ill-educated boy,” he writes, “I once thought no one would ever give me much that would prove very useful in terms of realizing my evolving dreams. Turns out it’s been gifts all the way.” Out in the outback, news traveled slowly. In that vast remoteness, a place where the people were “secure from the world,” even such momentous events as the dropping of the atomic bomb took their time to become known. Now news arrives quickly, and so does everything else. Kittredge brings the news in reverse, writing about the eternal verities, the cycles of planting and harvest and butchering. His portraits of the people who work the land are immediate and affecting. In one piece, he recalls driving across the desert with a broken-down rodeo cowboy who traveled in a pink Cadillac with no windshield—“not broken out, but missing entirely, as if it had never been there,” oblivious to the fact that it was “a windy sonofabitch” out there but well aware that his shaven-for-Sunday-meeting face was now plastered with bugs and saddened by the fact, as Gregory Peck, Kittredge adds, was saddened in the movie The Gunfighter by the fact that he’d never owned a watch. Kittredge recounts missed steps along the way, moments of bad management and poor harvests and the beauties of living in a place where the wagon tracks from a century past were still carved into the desert floor and the air was sharp and fresh—a place that largely exists now in his imagination.
A fine summation of Kittredge’s excellent body of work.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55597-479-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
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