An engaging, lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of the...
A group biography of four writers who are held as standard-bearers for a new movement in 20th-century literature.
Historical periods rarely break into neat divisions, but Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times book website and current critic for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York, makes a solid case for 1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era began—modern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and artistic modernism. His four cases in point—Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence—produced significant, even definitive work that year. Perhaps most significantly, Eliot published The Waste Land, forever altering the poetic landscape by showing that nightmare and saga could be brought to bear on the neurasthenic postwar present. Not that Eliot was the nicest of guys, and perhaps a certain meanness of spirit defines modernism as much as any literary trope. As Goldstein writes, “Eliot often dealt in very narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot well…did not trust him.” Though 1922 was also the year in which the much-admired Marcel Proust died, Woolf took her cues from James Joyce and took as a challenge the need to “confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the mind.” Interestingly, Goldstein traces her evolution as having been sparked by a kind of imagined writer’s block that led her to yield to what she called the “common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudice,” and began to produce inventive, experimental books in a challenge that she trusted those readers to accept. Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars; though Lawrence is barely read these days, the others still hold up, and he brings fresh eyes to all of them.
An engaging, lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of the modern.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9402-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
