Review by New York Times Review
THE FULL CATASTROPHE: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, by James Angelos, (Broadway, $16.) To understand Greece's current financial crisis, look to its full history, not just reports of endemic corruption and dysfunction, Angelos argues here. Competing images of Greece - as both a birthplace of Western culture and modern floundering state - have exacerbated tensions between the country and the rest of Europe. THE ARCHITECT'S APPRENTICE, by Elif Shafak. (Penguin, $17.) During the Ottoman Empire, a young boy from India studies under the sultan's chief architect and helps to construct some of the region's most magnificent structures: the Suleimaniye and Selimiye mosques. Shafak's novel captures the era's richly textured social fabric and functions as "a love poem to the cosmopolitan beauty of Istanbul," our reviewer, Christopher Atamian, said here. YOUNG ELIOT: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land," by Robert Crawford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) This biography traces the influences of Eliot's Midwestern upbringing on his writing years after he moved to his adopted home, England. Crawford "has done exceptional spadework in turning up clues that take us deeper into Eliot's symbolic landscapes, often rooted in childhood," David Yezzi wrote here. THE ANCHORESS, by Robyn Cadwallader. (Picador, $16.) In this novel, it's 1255 England and 17-year-old Sarah, fleeing indignities and violence in the secular world, has chosen to cloister herself in a small cell in her village's church. From her room, she learns to balance the outside world's influence with her interior life as she deepens her relationship with God, and wrestles with the fraught relationship between piety and gender. I AM SORRY TO THINK I HAVE RAISED A TIMID SON, by Kent Russell. (Vintage, $16.) Russell's essay collection forms a pointillistic portrait of American masculinity, including dispatches from its extremes - Russell writes about Juggalos, Amish people who love baseball and a snake handler - and his own experience. As an outlier in a military family, Russell is often at odds with his father as they spar over competing ideas of what it means to be a man. THE SUNLIT NIGHT, by Rebecca Dinerstein. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Both Yasha and Frances have fled to the far reaches of an Arctic archipelago: He, a Russian immigrant living in Brighton Beach, came to bury his father, while Frances sought refuge from her family and ex-boyfriend, armed with a desire to paint. The novel follows them as they forge a bond while grappling with their losses. INDEPENDENCE LOST: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, by Kathleen DuVal. (Random House, $18.) Eight representative historical figures shed light on the American battle for independence on the Gulf Coast. African-Americans, Native Americans, Irish immigrants and Cajuns all contributed to the area's fight, which was the site of some important British defeats.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The man whose The Bard (2009) dispelled the myths and mists about Robert Burns now publishes the first volume of a biography every bit as magisterial on the most consequential anglophone poet of the twentieth century. Indeed, revelation and enlightenment begin with the title, for the predominant conception of T. S. Eliot is that he was never young. Yet the milestone toward which this book proceeds, the epoch-making long (but hardly plethoric) modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), was the work of a still-young man moreover, tissue of allusions that it is, a work of memories amassed during an intense, busy youth. To keep the fact of Eliot's early life constantly before us, Crawford always calls him Tom, as his family and friends did. Drawing on, besides the poet-critic's published writing, an immense body of letters and other documents, Crawford maintains focus on the gestation of the poetry while Tom the boy, teenager, collegian, doctoral student at Oxford, and young banker dealt with handicaps (a hernia), learned sailing and tennis, enjoyed friendships, traveled, and fatefully married the chronic invalid, Vivien Haigh-Wood. All the while, he studied world literature and forged an understanding of tradition that remains among his greatest gifts to world culture. It's hard to imagine a literary biography of greater merit being published this year.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer Crawford (Scotland's Books) offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot's youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man. In exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail, Crawford chronicles, year-by-year, the young Eliot: his childhood, divided between St. Louis and Massachusetts; his painful shyness and love of dancing; his years at Harvard, his post-Harvard experiences in Europe and first, though unrequited, love ; his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood; and his early publications of poetry, leading up to The Waste Land's release in 1922. Eliot's affinity for the sacred is traced to his upbringing in an "idealistic, bookish household," to his keen ear for St. Louis's rich confluence of music-both opera and jazz-and to his love of birdsong. Readers also learn about Eliot's difficult marriage to Haigh-Wood, which brought neither of them happiness, though Eliot wrote to Ezra Pound that "it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land." Crawford's masterly biography, with its great depth, attention to detail, and close reading of the youthful Eliot's writings, is likely to become the definitive account of the great poet's early years. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This work is much more complete than other well-received T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) biographies (e.g., Peter Ackroyd's from 1984 and Lyndall Gordon's from 1998) because Crawford (modern Scottish literature, Univ. of St. Andrews; Scotland's Books), writing after Eliot's widow's death in 2012, has had access to primary sources that were off-limits to earlier researchers. Nonetheless, the author notes, this work, for which a second volume is planned, is not an official biography. Crawford demonstrates how Eliot's American upbringing and his later experiences in France and England helped make him "the most influential and resounding poetic voice of the 20th century." Published just after the 50th anniversary of Eliot's death (January 4), the book covers his privileged Unitarian childhood following his birth in St. Louis through his relocation to England and the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, considered the most important 20th-century poem in English. Key elements explored here include Eliot's precipitous and disastrous first marriage and its effects on his health and work, collaboration with Ezra Pound to modernize English literature, and involvement with the Bloomsbury and Garsington cultural establishments. Intermingled with material about his life are detailed accounts of Eliot's poetry, prose, and criticism produced during this period. VERDICT Wonderful for serious Eliot scholars. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]-Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A masterful biography of the canonical modernist.In this first of a proposed two-volume life of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Crawford (Modern Scottish Literature/Univ. of St. Andrews; On Glasgow and Edinburgh, 2013, etc.) examines the poet's youth and early career, ending with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Drawing on sources not available to previous biographers, the author fashions an authoritative, nuanced portrait. Eliot was the seventh child of a wealthy St. Louis family whose provincialism he was determined to escape. Drawn to poetry even as a teenager, he fell into "an intense engagement" with the 19th-century Romantics. At Harvard, where he was a mediocre student, he discovered the French symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue, whose poems possessed "a compulsively insinuating music" that Eliot began to imitate. Not surprisingly, he yearned to go to Paris, a plan his doting, overprotective mother sternly discouraged. Nevertheless, in 1910, Eliot sailed for Europe, enrolling in classes with the groundbreaking sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychologist Pierre Janet and philosopher Henri Bergson, thinkers who stimulated Eliot's ideas "about the intersection between religious mysticism, asceticism, and hysteria in primitive' and modern life." In 1914, he again left America, this time for a year at Oxford that proved life-changing: He met Ezra Pound, who responded to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with exuberant praise. Pound opened doors, and by 1920, married, living in London, editing and reviewing while working full-time at a bank, Eliot had become "one of the best networked younger figures in London literary publishing." Crawford illuminates Eliot's tormented first marriage to the volatile Vivienne Haigh-Wood; his complicated relationships with Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf; and his struggle to find an American publisher. Most crucially, he explores the swirling aesthetic and philosophical forces that shaped Eliot's startling poetry. Although Crawford modestly claims that his biography is neither "official" nor definitive, it is unlikely to be surpassed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
