An inspiring appreciation from one writer to another.
An admiring critical portrait of a great American poet and a master of subtlety.
For Irish novelist Tóibín (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; Nora Webster, 2014), the power of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) isn’t just in her rich sensory and physical details, but in her restraint. Her strength, he writes, is in “the space between the words, in the hovering between tones at the end of stanzas.” Bishop’s poems aren’t abstract; they bear vivid witness to every place she ever lived, from her native Boston to Nova Scotia to Brazil, as well as all the people, roosters, fish and moose she encountered along the way. But rather than confront her subjects head-on, Tóibín writes, “she buried what mattered to her most in her tone, and it is this tone that lifts the best poems she wrote to a realm beyond their own occasion.” She was, likewise, circumspect about her private life; rather than openly address her lesbianism, she found security in “closets, closets and more closets.” Famously disciplined and a constant reviser—decades could lapse between inspiration and publication—she loathed the instant gratification of confessional poetry and was miffed when her friend Robert Lowell raided her letters for material. In Bishop-like fashion, Tóibín approaches his subject both directly and not. He responds to her personally, seeing a fellow restless spirit whose work “dealt with the pull toward a place despite the lure of elsewhere.” To get a fix on Bishop at the macro level, he weighs her against the competition, which proves more fruitful in some cases (Lowell and Bishop’s mentor Marianne Moore) than others. The book loses steam when Tóibín tries making an extended and rather dull case that Bishop and her younger contemporary Thom Gunn were virtual peas in a pod.
An inspiring appreciation from one writer to another.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-15411-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
