There’s always something afoot in these pages, but the atmosphere bespeaks sweet torpor as Greene pursues an infusion of...
The story of yet another French country house and its travails in the hands of its new, non-French owners, this time told in a relaxed, un-selfconscious, and observant fashion by poet Greene (American Spirituals, not reviewed).
In the small Burgundian village of Rogny in France’s Puisaye, still a raw and wild landscape, Greene and his wife purchase the remains of a presbytery and set about putting it back in shape. This is to be a weekend place—they live in Paris and have day jobs, Greene’s taking him back to the US every autumn—so they can’t get too precious about the details of getting the house up to speed, nor so enrapt as to become tedious. They display just enough exasperation to show that they’re thoroughly familiar with the distinctively French sense of time. Greene gets to know his neighbors as humans rather than sideshow curiosities, charismatics and nuisances together: “farmers, woodsmen, artisans, widows, thieves, and drunks,” the last category including the alcoholic Coco, “the tutelary spirit of the presbytery.” Running through the story are the happenings—enough of them disagreeable to create a convincing sense of reality—that make up a life: big occasions, like Greene’s and Mary’s wedding or his mother’s arrival to live with them; smaller ones, like their maneuverings with a neighboring marquis to acquire a prayer path of ancient hornbeams bordering their property, or the purchase of furniture of suspicious provenance. Greene is also attentive to the land, discerning its seasonal moods, mooching along its river, informing himself about its wildlife, even adopting and nursing a robin-like bird he names Charles, which promisingly returns to the wild.
There’s always something afoot in these pages, but the atmosphere bespeaks sweet torpor as Greene pursues an infusion of pleasure, a modest slice of history, an honest sense of place.Pub Date: March 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018820-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
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.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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