An equable, frequently elegant, and unpious essay on the vagaries and harmonies of fiction. Although Dillard seems at first (and at the last) to chide modernist fiction for being "device laid bare," she's sophisticated enough to recognize its abiding, even traditional strengths—the plenitude, the overlapping of contexts, the constructive glee: "it dissects the living, articulated joints where temporal events merge and arranges the bright bones on the ground." As the scientifically and epistemologically oriented author of naturalist meditations (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm), Dillard does not discard potential tools of knowledge; she sticks with modernist fiction beyond skepticism and relativism until it too offers up the "bits of world" from which all fiction—most human of arts—is made. She isn't dazzled by language per se: "Language is itself like a work of art: it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river?" But she does stand in awe of prose as a cognitive apparatus—"as though a wielded wrench, like a waved soap bubble wand, were to emit a trail of fitted bolts in its wake." For that reason, she's especially fine here on the honor of "plain" prose (Henry Green, Eudora Welty, Wright Morris); its "stubborn uniqueness." Equally lucent is Dillard's chapter on hidden meaning, on the novel of ideas; it serves as a good, if less rigorous, complement to Mary McCarthy's recent laments. But Dillard's central argument is a plea for fiction, with its valuable sloppiness and unshakable traditionalness, to expand into a thoroughgoing, unpinched, and unapologetic branch of knowledge: "We are missing a whole new class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning." Dillard's tone may be a little too general, a little too loose (she seems to be measuring her good-natured essayistic lope at all times), but that integrative wish is fundamentally sane and attractive. An enjoyable and thoughtful, often superbly phrased little book.
Pub Date: March 23, 1982
ISBN: 0060915447
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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