From Publishers Weekly
An amazingly prolific man of letters, Updike serves up a feast in this massive compilation of essays, speeches, prefaces, a playlet and dozens of book reviews, the latter of which make up the bulk of the book. In conversational, urbane, witty prose he offers a dizzying smorgasbord of opinions on baseball, pop music, architecture, national monuments, the Gospel of St. Matthew, Ben Franklin, Mozart's music (it "gives us permission to live") and the modern artist as courter of risk and danger. While his portrayal of women as "reasonable and right" non-protesters, a trait he implies is biogenic, smacks of male chauvinism, he is more enlightening in discussing Eros and men's mythologizing of women's bodies. Along with appreciations of Edmund Wilson ("a paragon of intellectual energy and curiosity") and John Cheever, there are travel pieces ranging from Finland to dysfunctional New York City. Whatever the topic, Updike never fails to offer a perspicacious comment and fresh observation. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is Updike's fourth collection of nonfiction, or "odd literary jobs," as he calls them: "the prefaces and puffs, the 'few paragraphs' on beauty or baseball--that a persevering writer, aging into a shaky celebrity, gets increasingly asked to do." There are short notices, a travel piece, and occasional pieces on assigned topics like fiction, women, national monuments, popular music, New York architecture, being on TV, and speeches. But mostly there are essays and reviews, a few on science or technical topics, but generally literary: from tributes to Edmund Wilson and John Cheever, to reflections on Matthew's Gospel or the criticism of Q.D. Leavis, to reviews of Roth, Murdoch, Shaw, Ecco, and many others. An appendix of comments on his own works ends the book. Everything, as we've come to expect, is very well and wittily handled, with broad, sometimes surprising knowledge and insights--perhaps precious and New York -ish at times, perhaps the work of one who can "write term papers for pay instead of grades," but clearly superior literary journalism. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
