Like fine banquet fare: Some items to be wolfed down, some savored slowly, some best stored in the fridge for a later day.
Erudite, occasionally curmudgeonly collection of reviews and ruminations by award-winning memoirist Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, 2006, etc.).
Most of these recent pieces first appeared in the New York Review of Books, whose generous space allotments give the author sufficient latitude to explore texts and performances in expansive, illuminating ways. Reviewing a staging of Euripides’s The Children of Herakles, Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.) is able to elucidate the play’s historical context and the author’s biography as well as to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the design, direction and acting. He can thus display—and his readers benefit from—his potent critical tools: his vast knowledge, particularly of classical antiquity; his comprehensive reading; his remarkable capacity to see the tangled connections invisible to the less learned. Each review gives a mini-seminar on history, literature, biography and the arts. His interests range widely. He intelligently covers films about 9/11, Alexander the Great, the Trojan War and Virginia Woolf, cattily calling Nicole Kidman in The Hours “pretty without being beautiful.” He critiques productions of plays by Harold Pinter, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde (who pops up continually) and Tennessee Williams (who gave Mendelsohn his title). He assesses Thucydides’ Histories of the Peloponnesian War and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Few critics can be more illuminating—and few more dismissive. Read consecutively, Mendelsohn’s essays begin to grate. He frequently implies that he alone gets what others manifestly failed to get. Sliced by his critical knife are some of his best-known colleagues, from Frank Rich and David Denby to unnamed others who gush and coo, avers the author, over trash, sentimentality and mistakes.
Like fine banquet fare: Some items to be wolfed down, some savored slowly, some best stored in the fridge for a later day.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-145643-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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