For Price’s many admirers and those new to his work alike, a worthy addition.
Bursts of on-air intelligence from the distinguished novelist.
Invited by a radio producer to recount a memory of Christmas past, Price (Letter to a Man in the Fire, 1999, etc.) caught the radio bug, and began to contribute short essays for NPR to broadcast whenever the news was slow. “For each piece aired,” he writes, “I’d receive a sum of money that would buy dinner for two at a modest good restaurant.” While hardly lucrative, the work, he continues, was beneficial to his larger career as a writer: it forced him to trim his already lean prose to fit into three- and four-minute slots, and to honor deadlines. This collection gathers a year’s worth of weekly columns that are, in the main, indeed lean—and full of strikingly well-told little stories. One is that Christmas memoir, which recounts an unexpected gift from a Roman beggar and is a marvel of verbal economy; another offers a fond portrait of the endlessly interesting, ancient doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about whom he writes, “to sit two feet from a smiling vital woman whose mind could leap from a Georgetown dinner in the late 1960s to the frozen Delaware and the Father of our Country in 1776 was a salutary shock”); others drop names—Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan, Ingrid Bergman—shamelessly, but more still honor Price’s unfamous relatives and ancestors and other citizens innocent of celebrity. Just a few of the pieces seem hurried and obligatory, among them an unremarkable complaint about the humdrum business of the book tour and an anti-television screed tailor-made for a fund drive. The occasional clinker aside, though, most of Price’s radio bits, like the commentaries of fellow NPR denizen Andrei Codrescu, translate well onto the printed page and hold up to repeated readings.
For Price’s many admirers and those new to his work alike, a worthy addition.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0369-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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