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Robert Crawford
Positive The Wall Street Journal As Mr. Crawford surveys Eliot’s life after the publication of The Waste Land (1922), he wisely doesn’t aim at new \'readings\' of Eliot’s poems, although he is careful not to neglect any one of them ... Mr. Crawford’s biographical net is a wide one, and I was more than once surprised and touched by something new that enriches the unpleasant Mr. Eliot into something other—richer and more strange ... For all his self-refashioning as a model Englishman, Eliot’s advice here seems to me very much in the American grain and strikes a note quite distinct from that of his august contemporaries. We should keep reading him with that note in mind.
Charles McGrath
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... affecting ... Mr. McGrath chooses a confidential, relaxed narrative tone that operates without seeming to have designs on his reader. It is quietly assumed that the different activities described are attractive enough to command our assent with no pressure on us to be properly instructed in all of them—we can pick and choose according to our taste. I was an imperfect reader of his longest chapter, \'Messing About in Boats,\' since my life has been spent without such messing about, indeed practicing a highly equivocal relation to anything involving deep water. But Mr. McGrath’s modesty is such that he makes no attempt to convince us he’s engaged in something we’d better get on with before it’s too late. If anything, he’s eager to play down the sport and his proficiency in it ... The possibilities for a poignant story ending in death are there, and Mr. McGrath makes plain how devastating was the loss of his friend. But the other Chip, though frequently present and active in the narrative, is not allowed to overwhelm it, and until late in the game remains a steady, inventive partner to the book’s main man, whether in sailing or lobstering or golf ... This memoir is artful but never makes overmuch of the varied kinds of play it finds worth writing about ... The book’s final chapter, \'Dying,\' is a painful account of Mr. McGrath’s friend’s death, but the book’s prevailing spirit is wholly life-affirming. It is in the fullness with which things large and small are rendered in all their humorous specificity that makes memorable what might be called the moral of the tale—that \'summer can happen almost anywhere.\'
Cathy Curtis
Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Curtis’s narrative comes alive when she quotes Hardwick’s devastating, strongly turned formulations about her husband ... Ms. Curtis is seldom moved to disagree with or correct Hardwick’s accounts, nor to persevere in a close look at how Hardwick’s sentences work to form convincing portraits of her subjects ... This may be a case in which more means less, when the parade of accolades is substituted for close engagement with the writing. It is a problem any biographer, certainly one as scrupulous as Ms. Curtis, has to face. I think she would agree in calling Hardwick, with her \'discrete observations and unusual metaphors,\' a writer’s writer, but critical demonstration is needed to make the label stick, something that can’t be done by a biography concerned to get all the names in.
Richard Greene
Pan The Hudson Review Do we need a new biography of Graham Greene? ... Richard Greene...gives us 600 pages of adulatory respect, mainly detailing where and when Greene visited here and there. The temptation not to follow the journeys is hard to resist. If one looks in these pages for anything resembling critical commentary, it will not be found ... RG (henceforth) refers but once to Shelden’s biography, calling it \'prosecutorial\'; his own, meanwhile, is wholly on the side of the defendant. The quality of RG’s prose is anodyne ... Norman Sherry doubtless goes into further detail...if we should be interested
John Berryman, ed. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
Positive The Wall Street Journal Now, in addition to his poetic oeuvre, here are all the letters by Berryman you’ll ever want to read—nearly 700 pages of them ... Editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae conclude their introduction to these letters with a brief justification for keeping annotations \'short and factual\'; their aim has been to house as many letters as possible within a single volume ... Perhaps the most useful thing any collection of letters provides is a fresh look at the work of their author ... These letters bear him out.
Ian McEwan
Positive The New York Times ... a well-oiled machine, and McEwan\'s pleasure in time-shifting, presenting events out of their temporal order is everywhere evident ... If such narrative happenings are too neat to be true, if the dispatching of characters and the tying-up of ends in the book\'s final chapters constitute striking effects rather than moral exploration and understanding, they are no less entertaining for that -- entertaining in the mode of earlier nasty British satirists like Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.
Andre Dubus
Rave The Boston Globe To be called a \'writer’s writer,\' as the late Andre Dubus has been labeled, is at best an ambiguous tribute. It suggests that such an artist produces sentences so subtle and handsomely crafted that only another writer, trained to notice such things, would be able truly to appreciate him or her. Unfortunately, it also hints these qualities will likely result in a relatively small audience, something which David Godine’s reissue of Dubus’s short fiction seeks to remedy by introducing a new generation to his work ... Although Dubus’s stories are filled with disasters—often involving marriages—in the best of his work \'the story seems to have its own uncontainable energy and trajectory\' ... A cynical reader, thinking of Dubus’s fiction overall, might be tempted to rewrite it thusly: The times are never so bad but that Dubus can make them worse. But with Hardy in mind remember the line from one of his poems: \'If a way to a Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.\' In such stories...the worst is looked at and a better sometimes painfully imagined through the unflinching voice of Dubus’s art.
Andre Dubus
Rave The Boston Globe To be called a \'writer’s writer,\' as the late Andre Dubus has been labeled, is at best an ambiguous tribute. It suggests that such an artist produces sentences so subtle and handsomely crafted that only another writer, trained to notice such things, would be able truly to appreciate him or her. Unfortunately, it also hints these qualities will likely result in a relatively small audience, something which David Godine’s reissue of Dubus’s short fiction seeks to remedy by introducing a new generation to his work ... Although Dubus’s stories are filled with disasters—often involving marriages—in the best of his work \'the story seems to have its own uncontainable energy and trajectory\' ... A cynical reader, thinking of Dubus’s fiction overall, might be tempted to rewrite it thusly: The times are never so bad but that Dubus can make them worse. But with Hardy in mind remember the line from one of his poems: \'If a way to a Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.\' In such stories...the worst is looked at and a better sometimes painfully imagined through the unflinching voice of Dubus’s art.
Donald Hall
Positive Commonweal Over recent years Hall explains that poems stopped coming to him, but that \'prose endures,\' and in these two hundred and some pages of mostly short and spiky items, he assesses his current situation ... a pervasive wit gives pressure to these opinions and reminiscences ... When Hall began to publish poems, roughly sixty-five years ago, anything like wit was notably absent ... Decades later, after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, he was able to write in a rather different spirit ... its presence in Hall’s late poems, and now in his prose, has given continuing life to the aging writer’s performance ... But the book does not end on that ultimate note of loss; rather there is a touching move back toward the living.
Lorrie Moore
Positive The Wall Street Journal What sustains overall this group of essays and commentary is a continuous critical spirit that stays in touch with life. Writing of the interlinked short stories in Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, Ms. Moore notes that everyone in them \'speaks in the same lively, funny, intelligent voice: the voice of the book\'—a judgment that applies equally to the disparate items in See What Can Be Done.
Alice Munro
Rave The New York Times In the most powerful of these new pieces — four or five of which seem to me to belong with the best of Munro — the central figure, usually though not always female, begins with a harsh hand dealt to her … What's impressive is that such vivid, external perceptions are complemented and balanced by a more exploratory, inwardly poetic kind of writing, which is especially evident in the three first-person stories … The lovely formal-sounding waves that fill this collection, surely Munro's best yet, are in their wise sadness the product of such attention paid.
Philip Roth
Positive The Boston Globe Unlike Roth's own boyhood worries about the Germans and Japanese, the novel's Philip worries about being a Jew in America headed by Lindbergh. ‘Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,’ the novel's opening sentence, is borne out in Philip's actively tormented imaginings: He dreams, for example, that his precious stamp collection (which he eventually loses while trying to run away from home) has been adorned with swastikas … What may be called the ‘Philip voice’ is in charge of the family story that contains such beautifully particularized events as the Roths visiting Washington for an ‘education’ trip and meeting, for the first time in Philip's consciousness, anti-Semitism.
Laura Dassow Walls
Positive The Boston Globe ...[an] ample, comprehensive, wholly sympathetic biography ... Although in recent years the major testament to Thoreau’s life as a writer has been the Journal, it is Walden that will keep him alive in the minds of most readers. Walls’s pages on that book employ precise and expressive language to bring out the sound of Thoreau’s voice — 'bold, lyric, yearning, prophetic, confrontational.' She also reminds us humorously that Thoreau is 'up on a soapbox,' concerned to make himself unmistakably heard ... Walls’s book abounds in memorable portraits of Thoreau in relation to his American literary contemporaries.
Richard Ford
Positive The Boston Globe The effort to create a presence is signaled by a plethora of conditionals: One paragraph contains the word 'must’ve,' 'might’ve,' and 'could’ve,’ with the emphasis on 'must' indicating how hard the writer is working to give his subject life. It has the effect of making Ford’s portrait of his father more interesting than that of his pretty, lively Catholic mother, even though the details of Edna Ford’s life are much more richly filled in. The book’s most vivid writing imagines what it was like before Ford was born, when Parker and Edna traveled together on the circuit, teaching young women how to make starch and use it ... Between Them is, designedly, not 'great literature,' and is content rather to provide an honest recording of two 'wonderful' if ordinary parents.
Christopher Hitchens
Positive The Boston Globe Everything Hitchens touches is treated in a style that’s actively probing, often fiercely critical, but always infused with ironic wit.
Jay Parini
Positive The Boston Globe Parini is a veteran biographer (Robert Frost, John Steinbeck) and shows it in the seemingly effortless way he unfolds Vidal’s life and works before us.