PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAnyone planning to write a biography of a living person might be forewarned by Deirdre Bair’s \'bio-memoir,\' her gripping account ... In Parisian Lives, which reads much like a \'making of…\' documentary, she gives us her off-camera take on her first two biographies. And, to our delight, we become voyeurs ... a story well told.
Hilary Spurling
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"Through her sympathetic portrait, [Spurling] can now introduce [Powell] and his chef-d’oeuvre to a new audience. For Powell fans of yesteryear, she offers more; finally we learn just how closely his life is mirrored in \'Dance,\' as Powell himself referred to his work.\
Peter Parker
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...in his fine exploration, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, Peter Parker attributes the poet’s popularity to something broader: The 'country' of his title is not the Midlands county of Shropshire but England itself ... Housman once described his poems as a kind of 'morbid secretion,' so what is their special appeal to his countrymen? Parker offers an answer: 'At heart, Housman was a romantic — though a romantic of a peculiarly doom-laden and tight-lipped English variety: Because one is lapidary, it does not mean one has a heart of stone.' Indeed. A century after A Shropshire Lad, with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the English finally learned to cry.
