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THE LAST SUPPER

A SUMMER IN ITALY

Not as agreeable as this season’s other Author Abroad memoir, Roland Merullo’s The Italian Summer (2009), but more rigorous...

As elegantly written and astutely observed as her fiction (Arlington Park, 2007, etc.), Cusk’s memoir describes looking at art and getting to know the locals from Tuscany to Naples.

The author and her husband sold their house in England, took their two daughters out of school and “decided to go to Italy, though not forever. Three months, a season, was as much of the future as we cared to see.” Cusk’s sharp wit is apparent even when perusing an Italian phrase book, “where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee…and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station.” She’s less appealing when bemoaning the physical ugliness of the modern world and snobbishly disdaining tourists who, like her, came to Italy to imbibe beauty. Just because these hapless folks stand in long museum lines—they hadn’t the foresight to book tickets ahead as Cusk did—and arrive in tour buses instead of in their own car, they aren’t necessarily incapable of appreciating Piero della Francesca or Raphael as much as the sensitive author. Still, Cusk’s assessments of art are wonderfully idiosyncratic, as is her analysis of Italian food: “soft and feminine…kind to children.” A cranky tour guide is preferable to a boring one, and except when dealing with the tourist hoi polloi, the author is sharp rather than nasty. Her account of a series of tennis matches brilliantly captures people’s personalities through their style of play, and her character sketches throughout are equally revealing. Husband and children are never named and deliberately left in vague outline, but we sense the family’s closeness and come to agree with Cusk that her daughters “have been formed, not bereaved,” by their sudden uprooting from everything familiar in their lives. Now they have their mother’s atmospheric account as a keepsake.

Not as agreeable as this season’s other Author Abroad memoir, Roland Merullo’s The Italian Summer (2009), but more rigorous and compelling.

Pub Date: June 2, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-374-18403-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

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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NUTCRACKER

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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