Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations...
Tidily composed, broadly researched examination of seven unconventional early modern marriages.
Cultural critic and novelist Roiphe (Still She Haunts Me, 2001, etc.) is drawn to artists who flourished between the two world wars because they were torn between Victorian and modernist sensibilities, their unions subject to conflicts and contradictions not unfamiliar to couples in our own era. Acknowledging her subject’s “natural prurience” only to brush aside doubts (“Why should it be prurient? Marriage is perpetually interesting.”), she delves eagerly into the intimate lives and letters of those in marital conflict and revels in their posturing. Inveterate womanizer H.G. Wells, for example, idolized his stay-at-home wife Jane even while carrying on with Rebecca West and asserting in his work the value of free love. Ailing, ethereal short-story author Katherine Mansfield and critic John Middleton Murry enjoyed a curiously chaste, childlike marriage; they lived largely apart, so their relationship remained abstract and purely romantic. By sheer force of her generous personality, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa was able to maintain her marriage to Clive Bell, nurture three children and keep several lovers around her at the same time. Aristocratic hostess Ottoline Morrell was shaken by the revelation of her husband Philip’s infidelity, even though her own numerous affairs included a long-term entanglement with Bertrand Russell. Novelist Radclyffe Hall had been faithful to Una Troubridge for 18 years when she became besotted with a Russian nurse and persuaded them both to join her in a tense “trio lesbienne” that endured for more than a decade. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby weren’t lovers, but Brittain found more happiness living with her girlhood friend than with husband George Gordon Catlin. Memoirist and novelist Elizabeth Von Arnim, today less well known than the others, also favored rule-breaking alliances.
Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations about some very familiar figures.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-33937-7
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
