Here, Callow (Son and Lover, 1975) finds Walt Whitman to be mysterious, evasive, contradictory—a ``psychological oddity'' whose very confessions, revelations, and disclosures created a ``thicket of identities'' that further obscured his real self. Callow repeats the familiar story: the deprived boyhood, the ragged but devoted family, the constant moving about to earn a living, from teacher to journalist, mostly in New York; then the sudden bursting into poetry, into song. The author traces Whitman's self-education in the theater, opera, painting, astronomy, geology, and phrenology; his friendships with artists, with Emerson and Thoreau; his knowledge of Dickens and Carlyle—all to be assimilated into his poetry. In Whitman's protean personality, Callow sees myriad contradictions: between his being visionary and practical; between his proletarian tastes and elitist friends; between his love of crowds and of solitude; between his poetry and his journalism; between his affirmation of life and his preoccupation with death; between his obsession with cleanliness and the squalor in which he often lived; between his Quaker background and his celebration of sexuality, which Callow dismisses as a ``weird sexual fluidity.'' But, ironically, the major contradiction belongs to Callow himself: Although he sees Whitman as America's ``first genuine voice,'' he explains the poetry by quoting English writers (Blake, Shelley, D.H. Lawrence) whom Whitman didn't read, while quoting only sparingly from the poet's own candid and engaging letters. A simplified and derivative summary of the life and works, no substitute for the inspired biographies by Gay Wilson Allen (The Solitary Singer, 1985) and Justin Kaplan (Walt Whitman, 1980), or for Whitman himself, especially in the brilliantly edited selected letters (1990). (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1992
ISBN: 0-929587-95-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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