A short book with a fierce bite.
The title suggests the tone, which offers more caustic wit than one usually expects in a quasi-academic overview.
“The pleasure of saying ‘sycophant’ is immense,” the Parkers (The Inferno Revealed: From Dante to Dan Brown, 2013) observe. “The word rolls delightfully off the tongue. One’s lips purse and expand. The s sound, the friction of the breath in a narrow opening, provides a hissing contempt.” That “hissing contempt” pervades the text, intensifying whenever it circles back to Donald Trump and the sycophancy surrounding him. Consider Chris Christie, who suffered a “descent from presidential contender to toady spokesman for Trump to silent stage prop to convenient butt of his childish fat-jokes.” For all the fun involved in the writing, there is some seriousness regarding sycophancy, its history and progression, from Milton (who targeted Satan as the first sycophant in Paradise Lost) through Shakespeare (Hamlet, Lear, and Othello all fall victim to sycophants) and proceeding through Proust and The Simpsons. Even the dismissal of a sycophant as a “brownnoser” has a noble cultural lineage: “Dante’s punishment for flattery—immersion in shit—exploits the long-standing association of flattery with excrement. Full or crap when alive, in death they are plunged into it.” The book ranges from academic study—and shifts from psychology to business management—to pulp fiction to the silver screen, but politics is where such suckage shines brightest. The authors make a side trip to England to castigate Benjamin Disraeli and Tony Blair but mainly concentrate on American politics in general and Republicans in particular. “Although it would be difficult in this cesspool of bootlickers, hypocrites, and other assorted pond scum to identify Suck-Up City’s flatterer-in-chief, Henry Kissinger would surely be a top contender.” Team Trump faces the harshest ridicule for its rampant sycophancy, but the book would have been stronger had it recognized this as a bipartisan disease. Barack Obama and the Clintons had their share of sycophants, and John F. Kennedy’s Camelot myth was built by his.
A short book with a fierce bite.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4089-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
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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