A forty-year retrospective of American trivia, trends, pseudo-objective insights, quick portraits and strained paradoxes. The Depression is infused with the Roosevelt glamour and scorn for Republican troglodytes; Horton's dixie cups, Okies, 25-cent movies and six-cent-an-hour jobs give way to G.I. Joe with his Ernie Pylesque paraphernalia, then to the age of Robert Hall, Sputnik and the "dusky" Angela Davis. Often enough, as with the "sex-drenched" 1960's, Manchester foregoes explicit interpretation. His basic slant is an epiglottal liberalism of the sort which expresses some sympathy for Owen Lattimore but fails to question the guilt of the Rosenbergs, while assuming a patrician superiority to the McCarthyites. The Bomb — had to be used to save lives; the Bay of Pigs — too bad the CIA muffed it. Legal and moral turpitude such as Judge Hoffman's at the Chicago Seven trial is often covered by omission. The book's farinaceous view of the world is speckled with American violence (the Republic Steel massacre, postwar comic books) and with a certain synthetic journalistic competence (Truman's 1948 whistlestop buildup). Even after gorging on the author's conventional wisdom and patronizing glosses, the reader will know little of what it was really all about. A big comedown from Manchester's The Arms of Krupp (1968).
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1974
ISBN: 0553341472
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1974
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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