When you’re done, even if you feel you’ve read all you need about sweet drugs and pert body parts, it’s hard not to like...
A darling of the postwar literary counterculture is honored in a tidy collection that makes coherent sense of what might have been a group of funny if disparate works.
Rather than reverting to chronology, Southern’s son (and literary executor) Nile and editor Friedman wisely divide the great man’s writings by genre (tales, new journalism, etc.) and subject (the film business, writing, etc.)—an arrangement that points out Southern’s strengths in each. Just as The Magic Christian and Easy Rider show his varieties of outrageousness, so do his short writings. The journalism (particularly his piece on working with “big Stan Kubrick”) reveals his ease at mixing tale-telling and corporate critique, while the letters, depending on your point of view, are either examples of fine verbal architecture or irritating self-involvement. His appreciations of other writers are personal and original, notably in his Paris Review interview with British novelist Henry Green and his love note on the weirdness of “Ed Poe” (as in Edgar Allan Poe). Of note to film historians is Southern’s go at adapting Arthur Schnitzler’s Rhapsody, A Dream Novel for the screen—the psychosexual drama Eyes Wide Shut would have been quite different if Kubrick had taken Southern’s tack of going “the comedy route.” As for sex and drugs, they waft throughout the collection, settling in as subject matter for such works as “A Conversation with Terry Southern and William Burroughs” and “Letter to George Plimpton: A Sports-Death Fantasy” (the latter involving ice cubes).
When you’re done, even if you feel you’ve read all you need about sweet drugs and pert body parts, it’s hard not to like Southern. He was big-hearted and irrepressible, an optimist of excess when it seemed such things were possible.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1689-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
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