A strong gathering of literary essays from a leading American critic and public intellectual. In her fourth collection of essays (after Bartleby in Manhattan, 1983, etc.)—all of which have been previously published in the New York Review of Books and other such venues—Hardwick trains her gaze on American writers and books. Among the categories of inclusion are “Old New York” (Edith Wharton and Henry James); “Americans Abroad” (Gertrude Stein, Margaret Fuller, Djuna Barnes); and “Fictions of America” (Richard Ford, Philip Roth, John Cheever, John Updike, and Joan Didion); and Hardwick rounds out her collection with an uncategorizable critique of televangelists from the South. Her particular strength, though, lies in the literary. She has known personally many of these writers, both living and dead. This may explain why one senses special pleading in a few cases. Her essays on John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford are deeply perceptive and beautifully written, but when it comes to Joan Didion, Hardwick seems to be making the best of a bad situation. Her insights are in this instance less compelling, perhaps because she can’t quite persuade herself or her reader that Didion’s novels hold up under the severest scrutiny. Hardwick’s particular strength is her casual-sounding yet deadly accurate language. In her essay on Elizabeth Bishop she writes: “Nothing is more striking to me than the casual prose of poets, with its quick and dashing informality, its mastery of the sudden and offhand, the free and thrown away.” This gracefully iambic passage describes (and embodies) one of the many virtues of her own prose, and it explains why reading her is such a pleasure. And, finally, anyone who doesn—t yet know what a weird national phenomenon Vachel Lindsay was should read that essay first. Taken together, these essays constitute a vivid reflection of American literary culture in the imagination of one of our most urbane critics.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50127-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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