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OBJECT LESSONS

Name: OBJECT LESSONS
Author: Eavan Boland
ISBN: 0-393-03716-9

THE LIFE OF THE WOMAN AND THE POET IN OUR TIME

by Eavan Boland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 1995

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An ultimately lackluster testimony to the truism that art and life can't be separated. One of Ireland's major poets, Boland (In a Time of Violence, 1994, not reviewed) uses personal experience to illustrate a straightforward argument on the poetic life. In the male poetry of the past, she states, the feminine was always muse, nymph, and symbol; by being elevated, woman was reduced to a silent object, with no individual personality or voice. By writing poetry, she argues, women reclaim their own subjectivity and turn the poetic tradition of Britain and Ireland on its head. Female poets then assume the responsibility of reexamining and reworking the traditional relationship between subject and object. To highlight this theme, Boland traces her own growing unease with the seeming discord between her life as a suburban housewife and the one about which she, as a self-identifying political Irish poet, was supposed to write. Unfortunately, the technique used does not do justice to the basic premise. Despite a keen eye for image, Boland's rhetorical style is extremely heavy-handed. She sets out to unwind her argument and story as she would a poem, returning to the same images more than once, until, she states, the argument ``loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.'' Her narrative is repetitious without revealing a new idea or nuance each time, and the majority of her images, although sometimes symbolically potent on their own, are raised and then quickly dropped. The few images she does return to—such as the table where she spent hours as a young woman trying to become a writer or the suburbs where she later lives—don't have the same power as the ones she never fully explores. As a short essay on poetic theory this might have been effective; as a full-length memoir it fails to move.

Pub Date: March 20, 1995

ISBN: 0-393-03716-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CITIZEN POET
by Eavan Boland ; edited by Jody Allen Randolph

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAKING OF A POEM
edited by Mark Strand & Eavan Boland

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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...

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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.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC!

NEWPORT, SEEGER, DYLAN, AND THE NIGHT THAT SPLIT THE SIXTIES

by Elijah Wald ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2015

An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...

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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.