Review by New York Times Review
WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) After his best-selling "Between the World and Me," Coates could have cashed in with a standard miscellany. Instead, this master class in the essay charts his ascension as perhaps the important critic of our time. REVOLUTION SONG: A Story of American Freedom, by Russell Shorto. (Norton, $28.95.) George Washington is the hub of Shorto's book, which artfully weaves together the stories of six individuals from the Revolutionary period to give a sense of how far-reaching a phenomenon the War of Independence was. SCHLESINGER: The Imperial Historian, by Richard Aldous. (Norton, $25.95.) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has found in Aldous an agreeably judicious biographer who gracefully balances an appreciation for his subject's talents as a writer of narratives and speeches with an acknowledgment of his shortcomings as a political analyst and aide. SMILE, by Roddy Doyle. (Viking, $25.) Doyle's 11th novel is the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller: The protagonist's life goes off track after a stranger from his past shows up, reminding him of their Catholic school days amid signs of a deeper darkness the narrator refuses to confront. THE IMPOSSIBLE PRESIDENCY: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, by Jeremi Suri. (Basic, $32.) A historian traces the changing role of the presidency from Washington onward, arguing that as the job has become increasingly complex it now involves more than a single person can handle. SCALIA SPEAKS: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, by Antonin Scalia. Edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. (Crown Forum, $30.) This collection of speeches and writing by the famously argumentative Supreme Court justice, who died in February 2016, offers a clear picture of his originalist interpretation of the Constitution. THE THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON: Genius, Partisan, President, by Noah Feldman. (Random House, $35.) America's fourth president shifted his political orientation at least three times in his life. Feldman marks the changes in his nuanced portrait of the founding father. THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, by Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Minna Zallmann Proctor. (New Directions, paper, $12.95.) A Swiss-Italian writer presents short impressionistic takes on Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and the French Symbolist Marcel Schwob. FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, by Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.) Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this eloquent, whimsical collection, Swiss novelist and short story writer Jaeggy (I Am the Brother of XX) flexes her nonfiction muscles. The book is compact yet expansive in its content, with three poetic essays focusing on the respective lives of three enigmatic writers-Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. Jaeggy gracefully offers up wildly diverse anecdotes and obscure facts, going from the authors' rebellious grammar school days to the final moments before their mysterious deaths. Her narrative beautifully mimics the logic of dreams, seamlessly digressing from the main subject into unexpected territory, only to return back again. She explores the different muses, both human and inanimate, that shaped the lives and literature of these writers. Of De Quincey she writes, "The flaneur was driven forward by opium-fueled theological caprices," noting wryly of some of his contemporaries, "Robert Southey experimented with laughing gas" and "Ann Radcliffe sought out huge quantities of indigestible food." With playful exaggeration, she writes, "[Keats] was poor, according to W.B. Yeats, and couldn't build a Gothic castle... which inclined him instead toward the pleasures of the imagination." Each essay treats its subject matter tenderly and moves forward with the cadence of a meticulous and lyrical language. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three sensuous minibiographies in light and shade.This thin, almost pamphletlike book consists of three mesmerizing profiles of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. Jaeggy (S.S. Proleterka, 2003, etc.) is a Swiss novelist who writes in Italian. Reading each brief essay is like taking a small wafer into your mouth and letting it dissolve so you can savor the flavor of the words, the images, and the moody atmosphere. These are hybrids: biography/literary criticism/prose poem. Eschewing the conventional, Jaeggy fashions poetic collages with facts, quotes, and re-created incidents that quietly reveal the inner souls of each author. She is particularly interested in matters of creativity and inspiration, madness and death. De Quincey, who became a "visionary" when he was 6, relied on opium and laudanum to stimulate his creativity, becoming "distant from the terrors of the living." An "enigmatic sphinx," he died at 74 "but seemed a boy of fourteen." Schwob, who spoke three languages when he was 3, later took to using morphine. After a failed trip to Samoa to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, he returned home and locked himself in a house with his books. After he died, the "room smoked of grief." The Keats piece is the longest and best. It begins: "In 1803, the guillotine was a common children's toy." Extremely bright, he "became the scribe and secretary to his mind" and forged friendships with Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Shelley ("lukewarm"), Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Before he died at the age of 25, Keats "spoke for hours in a lucid delirium [and]...never lost his faculties." After his death, "they stripped the walls and floor and burned all of the furniture." One of the only drawbacks of this book is its shortness. It would have been ideal if the publisher could have added additional essays. Enjoy these short, meditative pieces slowly; Jaeggy is addictive. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
