A pedestrian look at the postwar Boston poetry scene by a lesser poet filled with his own self-importance. With the possible exception of San Francisco, Boston in the late 1950s was home to more of the nation's poetic talent than any other city. The number of major talents either residing there or passing through certainly warrants a cultural history, but this isn't it. Davison, longtime poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly, attempts an insider's look into the lives of such figures as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Stanley Kunitz, all of whom he continually upstages. He ends a chapter on Anne Sexton, for example, by quoting one of his own poems in its entirety—in a book that generally quotes sparing snippets of verse. Of most value is the first chapter, which details the rise and demise of the Poets' Theatre of Cambridge, which commissioned new works by poets and gave them a stage. The rest of the text coasts superficially through everyone's life and work; the literary gossip is stale, poetic analysis almost absent. Everything but Davison's own career, which occupies a long second chapter, is treated in shorthand; even the glaring sexism of the Boston poetry scene is simply mentioned and dismissed. The coverage of women poets is particularly ungenerous and snippy; the chapter on Adrienne Rich ends with the unsupported observation, ``Though no poet of this period expended more agony on the will to change, others may well have more completely succeeded.'' Perhaps the central unanswered question of the period is the one posed by Richard Wilbur: ``A lot of people were falling apart and preparing to die, and I wonder to what extent that is really unrelated to choice of literary style.'' Don't look for answers here. (16 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40658-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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