Thoroughly annotated and judiciously selected—a vivid snapshot of 20th-century intellectual life and an informative glimpse...
Warm, chatty letters over six decades between a short-story master and her New Yorker editor.
When they met in 1942, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) had yet to appear in the New Yorker, though William Maxwell (1908–2000) was already an ardent admirer. It took him another nine years to persuade founder Harold Ross, who found Welty’s work suspiciously “arty,” to publish “The Bride of Innisfallen.” The correspondence kicks into high gear with an exchange of letters over that story’s galley proofs, revealing Maxwell as a sensitive and respectful editor. Their friendship was by then firmly established and embraced Maxwell’s wife Emmy; editor Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll; Eudora Welty, 2005, etc.) includes a few of her letters as well. Welty and Maxwell share the pangs of creation—both were painstaking writers who often took a long time to gestate short works—as well as tips about gardening and updates on their families. The Maxwells met Welty’s mother and beloved nieces several times; Welty adored the couple’s two daughters, whom she saw on her frequent stopovers in New York. The writers exult together as honors are showered on both in later years: Welty garnered a Pulitzer prize for The Optimist’s Daughter, and Maxwell’s novella So Long, See You Tomorrow in 1980 won the Howells Medal, which Welty had received 25 years earlier for a novella dedicated to the Maxwells (The Ponder Heart). Even as old age, ailments and the deaths of friends and relatives assail them, the tone of their letters is almost always positive and supportive. Indeed, both writers were such thoroughly nice people that readers may occasionally wish for a bit of mean-spirited gossip of the sort that enlivens Virginia Woolf’s correspondence. Still, it’s inspiring to see a literary friendship apparently untainted by competitiveness or jealousy, though the sameness of tone makes this better for browsing than a cover-to-cover read.
Thoroughly annotated and judiciously selected—a vivid snapshot of 20th-century intellectual life and an informative glimpse of the author-editor relationship, as well a tender portrait of devoted friendship.Pub Date: May 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-37649-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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