A deeply informed, perceptive literary study.
A beautiful study of a young poet haunted by war.
Exemplary scholarship and profound sensitivity combine in Stanford English professor Jenkins’ nuanced reading of the early work of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), beginning with the first poem the 15-year-old wrote in March 1922 and ending in 1937, when Auden left England to live abroad. As Jenkins portrays him, Auden in the 1920s and ’30s, was “a raw, intense, wounded, politically ambiguous, prophetic figure” fascinated “with Englishness and the meaning of England.” Two forces shaped his poems: the catastrophes of World War I and the collective sensibility of English society’s “gradual, dazed, selective rediscovery and reenchantment of the rural landscape.” Although not aiming to craft a comprehensive biography, Jenkins provides such detailed information about Auden’s life during this period, along with historical, cultural, and political context, that the result is a fascinating biographical study, as well as an authoritative close reading of selected poems “that open most fully onto the issues—war, trauma, identity, nationality, belonging, love—that are central to Auden’s early writing.” Jenkins examines Auden’s evolving literary influences, including Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and the Sitwells. By 1926, Auden was writing “Sitwellian” poetry but soon emerged from what Jenkins deems a short-lived “self-consciously modernist phase.” Early travels in Germany confirmed Auden’s sense of Englishness, but by 1935, his marriage of convenience to Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, and his affinity for German poets such as Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin, led him to widen his perspective away from England. In the early poems, though, as Jenkins amply shows, Auden was acutely sensitive to the fragility and sensibility of a wounded nation: “The First World War appears like a light, always on, that is discernible as a glow even through the fabric of a closed curtain.”
A deeply informed, perceptive literary study.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780674025226
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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