The Chaucer revealed by the last few decades of critical scholarship is much in need of a good popular biography; the cosy trivialities of Marchette Chute's 1946 Geoffrey Chaucer of England have little to do with the joyous solempnitee and vast sophistication we now discern in the works. No one could be more pleasantly qualified for the task than Gardner: poet, novelist, and veteran Middle English scholar and translator. This spirited book (a companion to Gardner's more specialized The Poetry of Chaucer, p. 28) scrubs away some of the more fatuous cliches surrounding our sanest poet. Gardner painstakingly sets the skilled civil servant's professional record against the fortunes of his royal masters and the course of the French and Spanish wars. For England the last decades of the 14th century were an age of glory, rapine, bankruptcy, extortion, and increasingly murderous debate over the limits of royal and parliamentary power. For the London vintner's son, they were a time of ceaseless, sometimes perilous achievement: he was at various times diplomatic negotiator, controller of the important wool customs, knight of the shire for Kent, justice of the peace in the same county, and chief clerk of the king's works with responsibility for overseeing construction and maintenance of various royal buildings. Gardner steers through this crowded career with polish and enthusiasm. But his attempts to fit the poetry into his biographical scheme are often highhanded. It is a pity that he does not explain more about his grapplings with dating problems and other textual matters, for his account of Chaucer's poetic development contains a lot of personal leaps in the dark (e.g., the blithe claim that the Physician's Tale is a late and very sophisticated work) that are not identified as such for the lay reader. Part of the difficulty is Gardner's avowed pursuit of something between "academic history" and "poetic celebration of things unchangeable." The deathbed scene he cooks up for Chaucer is as silly as any 19th-century explanation of the poet's celebrated and baffling Retraction. Against such interpretive oddities one must weigh the sheer joye and lustihede of Gardner's approach and the intellectual unity which he does by hook or by crook manage to impose on the life and the works. Forcefully written, provocative, and filled with a likable spirit of freewheeling evangelism.
Pub Date: April 1, 1977
ISBN: 1435107373
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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