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JAMES WRIGHT

Name: JAMES WRIGHT
Author: Jonathan Blunk
ISBN: 978-0-374-17859-8

A LIFE IN POETRY

by Jonathan Blunk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2017

A much-needed, engaging, and discerning biography that should help Wright find a new generation of readers.

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An authorized biography of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet.

Even though they never met, in Blunk, poet and co-editor of Wright’s Selected Letters, James Wright (1927-1980) has found his Boswell. Blunk’s account of the poet’s life is often a day-by-day record of just about everything significant he did. Anne, Wright’s second wife, provided his biographer with reams of primary source material—Wright was a relentless letter writer—and Blunk conducted hundreds of interviews and compiled a detailed schedule of Wright’s readings. Thanks to a prodigious memory, he could entertain his audiences by reciting hundreds of poems as well as his own. He was born in the run-down, industrial town of Martins Ferry on the Ohio River and was always desperate to leave it, which he did with a stint in the Army. His first wife, Liberty, even married him “to get out.” But Wright never really left, and it inspired his poems, with themes of a “baffled loneliness,” poverty, and down-and-out people. Blunk meticulously explores Wright’s years of teaching, his painful bouts of depression, his recurring alcoholism, and how his poems were crafted. Wright was a maker of poems, revising them over and over, constantly constructing, tearing down, and rebuilding. Quoting generously from Wright’s poems throughout, Blunk carefully chronicles the ongoing development of his style as he moved from regular meter and rhyme to free verse, simple language, and striking imagery. His many translations of contemporary Spanish poetry helped contribute to this evolution—as did Wright’s close friend, poet and editor Robert Bly, who did “more than any other poet to secure Wright’s legacy.” Virtually every important poet of the age had links to Wright, including James Dickey, Donald Hall, W.S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke, and Galway Kinnell. He became especially close to Anne Sexton.

A much-needed, engaging, and discerning biography that should help Wright find a new generation of readers.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-374-17859-8

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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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.