A new collection of personal essays from a self-proclaimed “depressive pessimist” and “angry, bird-loving misfit.”
Franzen’s (Purity, 2015, etc.) third collection of recently published essays and speeches sparkles with intelligent and insightful forays into a limited range of subjects. The opening piece, “The Essay in Dark Times,” could function as a primer for the book. We might be “living in an essayistic golden age,” while the personal essay “is in eclipse.” After recounting lessons learned while working on an essay with a wise New Yorker editor, the author jumps to bashing a “short-fingered vulgarian” and his “lying, bullying tweets,” concluding with his bird obsession and global warming, the “biggest issue in all of human history.” In “Why Birds Matter,” Franzen lovingly describes falcons, roadrunners, and albatrosses, among others. “Wild birds matter,” Franzen writes, because “they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding.” In another piece, the author describes his visit to South America to observe the beleaguered Amazon Conservation Association in action. In “May Your Life Be Ruined,” he chronicles his travels to Egypt to painfully watch migratory bird-killing with Bedouin falcon trappers. There’s literature here, too. In the expected writer-to-writers advice essay, he offers up one page of 10 pithy, odd dos and don’ts—e.g., “You see more sitting still than chasing after.” Franzen resuscitates Edith Wharton, praising her “most generously realized” The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, in which she “embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita.” There’s also the affectionate “A Friendship,” in which the author praises William Vollmann’s work ethic, vast projects, fine style, and “hunger for beautiful form.” The last, titular essay about a voyage to Antarctica is worth the cover price.
Witty, reflective, opinionated essays from a writer with the ability to “laugh in dark times.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-14793-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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