Though folktales made their literary debut in Italy a century before Perrault appeared in France, the country produced no Brothers Grimm—no master-compiler of popular tales as told. And it's this lack of a "readable master collection" that Calvino set out to remedy in adapting these 200 tales from 19th-century regional compilations. The bad news is that the renderings—at least in English—are absolutely flat: without spirit, pacing, flavor, style. (One is inclined to blame the translator who commits a rhyme like "Perle Pete,/ Pass me a pear/ With your little paw!/ I mean it, don't guffaw,/ My mouth waters, I swear, I swear!" Or uses such sloppy colloquialisms as "he was dying to get married.") There is also no storytelling guile: tale after tale begins, dully, "there was once a king who had three sons"—or "three daughters"—and it's only the exception that starts, seductively, "There was once a miserly king, so miserly that he kept his only daughter in the garret for fear someone would ask for her hand in marriage and thus oblige him to provide her with a dowry." And the monotony of the telling only accentuates the repetitiveness of the situations and the motifs—which is itself accentuated by the regional grouping (a maiden not only poses as a youth twice in 25 pages, she is each time subjected to the same tests). On the other hand, it is amusing to see the regional variants of "The Untamed Wife"; or how—differently—a princess fashions her own Prince Charming in the north (out of gold and jewels) and the south (out of flour and sugar). And there are a number of selections that are both sly and special to their locales—like the story of the Florentine who traveled so that he could return to Florence with something to talk about; or the earthy tale—one of several such from Friuli—of Jesus' and St. Peter's revenge on the woman who denied them hospitality (promised that, like her generous neighbor, she would do all day "whatever you begin doing this morning," she unwittingly rushed to "relieve herself" before sitting down to spin). A comprehensive and representative assemblage, then, for those with a specialized interest, but not on a par with the old Borzoi or ongoing Pantheon national collections for out-and-out pleasure.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1980
ISBN: 0156454890
Page Count: 804
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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