A generous but only sporadically impressive sampling from the noted novelist's occasional non-fiction over the past 20 years: book reviews, magazine articles, eulogies, commencement addresses, and other speeches. Styron's fiction following will be most interested, of course, in his reflections on the genesis of Lie Down in Darkness and Confessions of Nat Turner—along with an introduction that (echoing a few autobiographical pages in Sophie's Choice) bristles over some critics' historical/moral objections to Nat Turner. (In a James Jones eulogy, too, Styron lashes out at critics—"book-review hacks from Kansas City, lustful uptown votaries of Lionel Trilling.") There are brief tributes to Bennett Cerf, Philip Rahv, and Robert Penn Warren, longer ones to Fitzgerald ("the splendid equanimity, the compassion and humor, the love" in his letters) and to Thomas Wolfe—for his influence on a generation of writers, for his "clear glimpses . . . of man as a strange, suffering animal alone beneath the blazing and indifferent stars." Less persuasive are Styron's meditations on the Holocaust (which seem strangely obsessive in their emphasis on the not-just-Jewish nature of German war crimes), his reportage from 1968 Chicago, his quasi-defense of Norman Mailer re the Jack Abbott affair. (Styron, after writing an anti-death-penalty piece for Esquire—reprinted here—became involved in a somewhat similar embarrassment.) And along with sturdily balanced views of military matters in reviews of books on MacArthur and Vietnam, there are a couple of less predictable entries: a Nile travel-piece (brooding over tourism) and a 1961 paean to a camp-cult bio of Errol Flynn's last mistress. Very little that's fully developed or strongly involving, then—but, with a few autobiographical tidbits too (including a charming item about not winning a Rhodes scholarship), this potpourri will only be mildly disappointing for those who admire Styron's tough/sentimental/righteous blend of viewpoints.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1982
ISBN: 0099285541
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
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.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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