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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHAUCER

Name: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHAUCER
Author: John Gardner
ISBN: 1435107373

by John Gardner ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1977

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WRITERS AND WRITING
by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
STILLNESS AND SHADOWS
by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
GILGAMESH
translated by John R. Maier & edited by John Gardner

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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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.