Smart, solid, and well-paced: a pleasure for Franzen’s many remaining admirers.
Of maximum-security prisons, Dumpster diving, and privacy in a technological age: a collection of essays diverse and entertaining by the author of last year’s Big Novel, The Corrections.
Before The Corrections, which led circuitously to “Oprah Winfrey’s disinvitation of me from her Book Club,” Franzen was perhaps best known to general readers as the author of an arch, funny, and contrarian essay recounting the reasons for his “despair of the American novel,” published in Harper’s and thus known among the cognoscenti simply as “the Harper’s essay.” Revised to be still more arch and no less contrarian, if somewhat less lit-critical, the essay (now called “Why Bother?”) is reason enough to fiction lovers in this increasingly “infantilizing” culture to take Franzen’s nonfiction out for a spin, though it won’t please the academic readers it relentlessly twits in salutary slaps such as: “The therapeutic optimism now raging in English literature departments insists that novels be sorted into two boxes: Symptoms of Disease (canonical work from the Dark Ages before 1950) and Medicine for a Happier and Healthier World (“the work of women and of people from nonwhite or nonhetero cultures”). The other essays, most previously published in Details, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, deliver sufficient bang for the book, though none quite stands up to the centerpiece. Some of them, such as a perceptive study of the Post Office at work, manage to be quite timely even as they bear a few signs of age; others get a little weird, as when Franzen observes that smoking cigarettes serves, at least in his case, “to become familiar with apocalypse, to acquaint myself with the contours of its terrors, to make the world’s potential death less strange and so a little less threatening.” None, however, is predictable, and all bear Franzen’s trademark sensibility of smiling, even though scared silly, in the face of doom.
Smart, solid, and well-paced: a pleasure for Franzen’s many remaining admirers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-17327-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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