bookshelf

MELVILLE

Name: MELVILLE
Author: Andrew Delbanco
ISBN: 0-375-40314-0

HIS WORLD AND WORK

by Andrew Delbanco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2005

Lively and endlessly informative: a welcome addition to literary history, of a piece with Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club...

bookshelf

A graceful, sympathetic portrait of a writer all but forgotten in his day, but now seen as central to understanding the American character.

Delbanco (American Studies/Columbia Univ.; The Real American Dream, 1999, etc.) observes at the outset that Herman Melville left behind little documentary material about his life, even experiences as central as the suicide of his firstborn son; given the classic status accorded to works such as Moby-Dick and The Confidence Man, we tend to forget that he wrote fiction only for a period of about 15 years, turning after the age of 40 to poetry. Delbanco reads Melville’s prose work against the backdrop of American history, remarking that though Melville was born in a world whose rhythms were medieval, he died in one “that had become recognizably our own,” and linking Melville’s themes of quest and conquest, always on morally unstable ground, with the ambiguities of America in its dawning age of Manifest Destiny. In this regard, one of the first acts of American expansionism, Delbanco memorably notes, took place on a Pacific island Melville visited as one of the last practitioners of the preindustrial whaling trade; that work may have been wild, he adds in a luminous detail, but Melville’s shipmates included poets and readers, one of whom counseled, “That’s the way to publish . . . fire it right into ’em; every canto a twenty-four-pound shot; hull the blockheads, whether they will or no.” Melville took the advice, but the blockheads always blocked his way, so that, after the Civil War, he abandoned trying to write for a living and went to work for the Customs Department. Delbanco’s smart readings of Melville’s works, major and minor alike, do much to explain why literature remembers him more generously now.

Lively and endlessly informative: a welcome addition to literary history, of a piece with Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club and David Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2005

ISBN: 0-375-40314-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR
by Andrew Delbanco

- BOOK REVIEW
COLLEGE
by Andrew Delbanco

- BOOK REVIEW
WRITING NEW ENGLAND
edited by Andrew Delbanco

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.