Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly...
A lively collection of 19 generally stimulating book reviews and literary pieces, most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, by the prolific British novelist (Destiny, 2000, etc.), memoirist (An Italian Education, 1995, etc.), and essayist (Adultery and Other Diversions, 1999, etc.)
Parks, who lives and teaches in Verona, displays his credentials as a knowledgeable Italophile in the rich title essay, a review of Robert Hollander’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno that expertly analyzes the great poem’s virtuosic blending of history, theology, and literary artifice and offers a crisp comparative survey of earlier English versions. He also considers a biography of the 19th-century poet, idler, and hypochondriac Leopardi (“Surviving Giacomo”); Sicilian Giovanni Verga’s harshly naturalistic tales (“A Chorus of Cruelty”); the unconventional cultural nexus that embraced such great modernists as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and poet Umberto Saba (“Literary Trieste”); and, in the most probing of these essays, the life of futurist painter Mario Sironi (“Fascist Work”). The intricacies and pitfalls of literary translation (another skill Parks has mastered) are a frequent subtopic and take center stage in “Different Worlds,” which speculates intriguingly on the truism “that the same text can be so radically different in two different languages.” Elsewhere, Parks analyzes such modern classics as Henry Green’s under-appreciated novel Party Going (with its “marvelous fizz of shenanigans,” Dino Buzzati’s eerie allegory, The Tartar Steppe, and Jorge Luis Borges’s enchantingly fluid and learned nonfiction essays. Incisive reviews of current fiction (including Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, and José Saramago’s Blindness) are balanced by such pleasant surprises as his thoughtful review of Jay Neugeboren’s moving book about his brother’s schizophrenia (“In the Locked Ward”) and a pungent explication of British anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s theory of “schismogenesis,” which attempts to explain “strong personality differentiation within an overall group ethos.”
Food for thought and argument, invitations to widen the scope of one’s own reading. A fine addition to Parks’s rapidly growing oeuvre.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-610-4
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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
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