Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature. ... Read more

Product Description
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are widely acknowledged as the great pop poets of the 1960s, transforming the popular song into a medium for questionng the personal, social, and political norms of their times. They emerged at a time when the music industry was transforming the revolutionary sound of black music into something bland, homogenous, and fit for mass consumption. For many members of their generation, Dylan and Cohen were able to articulate what they were feeling and could not express: anti-establishement anger, angst, and despondency.

Dylan and Cohen is a fascinating political, psychological and artistic profile of these two iconic writers and performers. With reference to both biographical details and lyrics. David Boucher explores their similarities and differences, tracing the development of religious political, and social themes in their work and the ways in which those ideas engaged a new audience.

A must-read for all serious fans of either Dylan or Cohen, this book will also engage anyone interested in the North America of the 1960s, or more generally in the relationship between music, identity and politics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Take This Waltz
What makes this book such a unique and significant contribution to its genre is that it is written with the insight and sensitivity of a spirit that seems deeply attuned to those of its subjects. Not only does the reader come away with a better understanding of the historical times and political contexts that shaped these men, and the personal struggles and psychological bents that motivated their writing, but also with a clearer understanding of what attracts their devotees to their work.

Throughout the book, Boucher weaves explorations of various aspects of the lives and cultural context of Dylan and Cohen that strongly affected them and their work. These include the civil rights movement, drugs, women, sexuality, God and religion, what it means to be reluctantly identified as the voice of a generation, and -- particularly for Cohen -- the holocaust. Boucher also explores the influence of other artists on their work, from Woody Guthrie for Dylan to Lorca for Cohen, as well as the influence that Dylan and Cohen had on each other.

Just as Dylan and Cohen make poetry an accessible part of popular culture, with equal skill Boucher makes philosophy of art and interpretation accessible as well. He points out that our experience of lyric poetry is informed by the questions we bring to it and he explains that the richest experience is to be had when the most appropriate questions are asked. Boucher uses the theories of several philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood, Henry Jones, and Michael Oakeshott, to identify which questions are most appropriately asked of particular works at particular moments in the artists' creative development. He also shows the fruitlessness of asking the wrong kind of questions of a particular poem, as is the tendency of many thinkers.He describes various forms of artistic expression: pseudo-art, or art as magic; art as the expression of emotion, or imaginative art; and inspirational art, or poetry which delights in images. He then demonstrates how, at various stages in Dylan's artistic development, his work takes all three forms of expression, whereas Cohen's work primarily takes the form of the last two. He then offers examples from their poetry to illustrate which form(s) of expression is/are being inhabited by a particular work and he supports his demonstrations with quotations about their work from the artists themselves.

Finally, Boucher helps to bring the period to life for his reader by including several pictures of book covers, concert and film posters, magazine covers and various photographs. The overall result of the book is that Boucher successfully positions his readers to have a richer experience and a deeper understanding and appreciation of the lyric poetry of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

Compulsively Readable
This is an excellent study of the music and lyrics of the 2 greatest rock "poets."Boucher explores whether or not their lyrics even qualify as poetry and keeps the subject interesting!He effectively delves into their psyches,as well, without getting hung up on personal, biographical details which have been over analyzed in other places.I found the final chapter "The Religious Experience" to be some of the best writing that I've seen on Dylan and Cohen's spiritual journeys.I highly recommend this to fans of either man's work.

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
The irate and intemperate person signing himself pepidude in a previous review seems incapable of being able to appreciate an argument or of understanding the nature of the exercise that David Boucher has undertaken. It is a thematic book with a wide range of references, not a book of facts about Bob Dylan.The author introduces us to the complexities of issues relating to the difference between popular music lyrics and poetry, between origins and originality, the poetry of imagination and inspiration and much more. Anyone interested in ideas and issues, and in theories as well as facts will find this book immensely stimulating and fascinating.

Poetry Always was the New Rock & Roll
David Boucher has written a book that examines in detail the contribution of both artists to the worlds of both literature and rock & roll. In his intoduction he looks at the progress of Cohen from serious poet to rock & roll recording artist and performer. This transition cost him status in the literary world but aided by the legendary "golden voice" and some consummate musicians it allowed him to reach a hitherto undreamed of audience.

Dylan, whom he refers to as "The Changing Man" in Chapter Three, was the chameleon-like performer who picked up, and discarded new personas and new musical styles at the drop of his very famous hat. The obvious example here is the infamous "electric tour" where Dylan was heckled and called "Judas". This abuse was, the book shows, not only for his perceived betrayal of the acoustic folk movement, but also a reaction to the contempt with which Dylan treated his audience. Dylan had always been a confrontational performer, and his response to such attacks was to become louder and less acoustic than ever. What David Boucher also shows is that this signified a shift from the community centred ethic of the folk movement to the excessive individualism and nihilism of the Beat poets who through the drug culture wanted, like Rimbaud, to experience the extremes.

In other chapters the myriad influences on both performers are examined as well as their involvement with political and religious organisations. Finally David Boucher gives us an insight into the road travelled by both men in search of their own personal salvation.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are complex men and complex performers. To listen to, or to read the works of either man is always challenging. In this book the author has written an analysis that is equally challenging exploring, as it does, the anger and the angst of the 1960s and beyond. I enjoyed every minute of the challenge.

How lovely does it get...?
David Boucher's masterly work 'Dylan & Cohen' is essential reading, not simply for devotees of these 'Poets of Rock and Roll' but for anyone with an interest in the history of the radical cultural, political and musical changes in the last century.

It is clear from this eloquent book that neither Dylan nor Cohen wished to speak for anyone but themselves and equally clear that the strength of their work would be seized upon by a generation looking for a new direction.Thankfully they both continued to write through their tribulations and we have a bank of some of the most evocative music to continue to listen to.

I urge you to buy this book but with a word of warning: you won't want to stop reading once you've started. ... Read more

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A biography of R. Buckminster Fuller, the architect and inventor whose investigations into the principles of nature influenced his designs and helped revolutionize our world. ... Read more

Product Description
The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco's gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.Amazon.com Review
From the time it first emerged as a renegade liberating voicein the early 1950s, beat writing changed the American social literaryscene. Poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti altered thesound of U.S. poetry while Jack Kerouac's bebop chant--particularly inhis classic On the Road--literally changed how Americansspoke. The beats' fame became so great so quickly that their criticsaccused them of hypocrisy. Not so Jack Spicer; while Ginsberg andKerouac were busy publishing and promoting their work, Spicer--whoseoriginal lyric voice and gay content still resonate today--spent mostof his time disdaining the publishing world and making enemies. InPoet Be Like God, journalist Lewis Ellingham and experimentalnovelist Kevin Killian have produced not only a fully realizedportrait of Spicer, but a complexly woven historical and literarytapestry.Spicer emerges here as a brilliant, difficult, and largelyunlikable man whose talent for writing matched his inability tofunction in the world. Ellingham and Killian are equally concernedwith explicating the San Francisco renaissance and charting theemergence of North Beach as a gay neighborhood; Poet Be LikeGod thus rediscovers Jack Spicer for a new generation of readersand presents us with a unique and startling look at gay and literaryhistory. --Michael Bronski ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

"Another Tin Ear Review from Kirkus"
In"Poet Be Like God" on the poet Jack Spicer, ever thornily but true to his own unique and innovative poetic vision, Kirkus yet again hits dead middle (with the emphasis on "dead") in displaying its tin ear and mean-spiritedness.Spicer, for all his personal flaws, was, and continues to be, an inspirational and influential poet to young and old writers and readers.

Spicer's Gnosticism
Spicer and Ginsberg influenced one another, as is clearly shown in this book.Ginsberg stole a lot of his ideas from Spicer, but he was still the greater poet because he touched upon the conversation of his times, while Spicer went whacko and had no real impact on his culture.Academics have taken up Spicer, but this has again had no echo at all in the popular culture.

It's particularly interesting to study the automatic side of Spicer's poetics from surrealism forward -- the relinquishing of choice for a ouija board automaticism that resulted in odd nonsense that probably did not come from the dead, but resulted in an arcane verse that did indeed catalyze some of the lazier aspects of SF poetry but which was a dead end.

Magisterial biography that brings to life a tormented alcoholic who was not even trying to be nice, or even well-dressed, enough, to enter into the public forum.

His best work is the discussions he offered in The House that Jack Built -- astounding to see what he could do when he DID enter into the public conversation.Too often in his poetry he seems to be mumbling to himself.Poets need to reconnect to the real world -- because the world is real -- it has an ecology and texture, and the poets who got this will survive.Others form dead ends into their lost selves.

Gnosticism is a dead end.

Essential Reading (Not An Exaggeration)
Poets in the 1950s and 1960s have been well served by some of their biographers, and in this thrilling critical treatment of Jack Spicer and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Ellingham and Killian join theranks of Peter Davison (The Fading Smile: Boston Poets from Lowell toPlath) and Bill Berkson and Joe LeSeur (Homage to Frank O'Hara) inmagically capturing the soul of an important school in the poetic fermentof those years. The San Francisco circle around Spicer was intense,prolific and inspired, but they didn't get the publicity that the New Yorkpoets received or that the Beats had showered on them. Lack of mediaattention didn't stop them. They were dedicated to a pure vision of poetryas an almost religious vocation. On his hospital death bed in 1965 (he diedat 40 from acute alcohlism), Spicer told friend Warren Tallman, "I wastrapped inside my own vocabulary." His genius/mania to use thatvocabulary in service of the Muse produced great work and reminded othersof the seriousness of their purpose. Spicer, in all his contradictions anddrives, leaps from these pages. The book as a whole bristles with the veryenergy it celebrates, both poetic and sexual (intrigue was in their blood),and is essential reading for all of us interested in the circles thatnurture poetry in every creative center. As if that is not enough, thequotations from a vast number of interviews of the surviving participantsmake this a delicious oral history as well as a compendium of hair-raisinggossip of the wild times in North Beach before tourists took it over fomartists.

Jack Spicer was not a Beat poet.
I have read Poet Be Like God, and I wish neither to rate it (but there'sno option available that allows one to opt out of the rating game) norreview it, but to make a correction to the idiotic Kirkus review: JackSpicer was NOT a "Beat" poet. There were a group of Beat poets inSan Francisco in the late 1950s, early 1960s (e.g.,Bob Kaufman), but Spicerwasn't one of them. His intentions in poetry were different from theirs;naturally, so was his aesthetic. Spicer was part of a triumverate of poetsthat included Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser who met at the end of WorldWar II in Berkeley, Ca., and were sometimes known as the BerkeleyRenaissance group, or more simply, and more accurately, as part of the SanFrancisco poetry scene (which was part of the New American Poetrymovement). That the Kirkus reviewer could make such an elementary andstupid mistake should be taken as a clear indicator of the idiocy of therest of the Kirkus piece of schlock.

Important biography of crucial postmodern poet
I find that the Kirkus review available here does ill-service to this important biography of Jack Spicer. One would have no inkling, from reading this review, that Spicer's poetry is one of the most influential sources for postmodern poetry and poetics in the 1990s. It is not some recent academic fad to study Spicer; rather, Spicer has been a crucial poet for many younger writers for over three decades. This biography, published at the same time with his collected lectures, should provide the opportunity for even more serious study of his work. ... Read more

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The most original, new work on Hesse in many years and the definitive study of the young Herman Hesse, offering much previously unknown material such as his "neo-Romantic" poetry of which two dozen are published here for the first time in the original. ... Read more

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The definitive account of the life, work, and legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss, father of modern anthropology and one of the postwar era's most influential thinkers.

When Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away last October at age 100, France celebrated the life and contributions of not only a preeminent anthropologist, but also one of the defining intellectuals of the twentieth century. Just as Freud had shaken up the antiquarian discipline of psychiatry, so had Lévi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology, transforming it from the colonial era study of "exotic" tribes to one consumed with fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and civilization itself.

Remarkably, there has never been a biography in English of the enigmatic Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on a welter of original research and interviews with the anthropologist, Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss fills this void. In rich detail, Wilcken re-creates Lévi-Strauss's peripatetic life: his groundbreaking fieldwork in some of the remotest reaches of the Amazon in the 1930s; his years as a Jew in Nazi- occupied France and as an émigré in wartime New York; and his return to Paris in the late 1940s, where he clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and fundamentally influenced fellow postwar thinkers from Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. It was in France that structuralism, the school of thought he founded, first took hold, creating waves far beyond the field of anthropology. In his heyday, Lévi-Strauss was both a hero to contemporary intellectuals and an international celebrity.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wilcken gives the reader a fascinating intellectual tour of the anthropologist's landmark works: Tristes Tropiques, a literary meditation on his travels and fieldwork; The Savage Mind, which showed that "primitive" people are driven by the same intellectual curiosities as their Western counterparts; and finally his monumental four-volume Mythologiques, a study of the universal structures of native mythology in the Americas. In the years that Lévi-Strauss published these pioneering works, Wilcken observes, tribal societies seemed to hold the answers to the most profound questions about the human mind. Following the great anthropologist from São Paulo to the Brazilian interior, and from New York to Paris, Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi- Strauss is both an evocative journey and an intellectual biography of one of the twentieth-century's most influential minds. ... Read more

Product Description
In 1880 Nietzsche observed that Goethe had been "not just a good and great man, but an entire culture."The author of Faust, of exquisite lyric poetry, and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, and poetry as well as treatises on botany and color theory, Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar.Now, Nicholas Boyle has written the definitive biography of this extraordinary figure--indeed, The Poet and the Age is the first full-length, original English-language biography of Goethe in sixty years.
In this elegant and enjoyable first volume--the first of two projected books--Boyle captures the passions and poetry of the young Goethe, leading us up to the moment when the French Revolution shook the foundations of all of Europe. Boyle contends that, although Goethe was certainly as much a part of German social and political life as he was its cultural nucleus, there was no single "Age of Goethe." Instead, Goethe's life spanned a great divide in European history:half was spent under a monarchy, and half under a middle-class bureaucracy.The first forty years of Goethe's creative life, rendered by Boyle in captivating detail, saw the early conception of Faust, and Goethe's rise to literary fame on the heels of his bestselling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, a book which captured the European imagination like no other before it. Werther became a fashion in a strikingly contemporary sense:impassioned readers imitated the clothing, the sentiments, and even the tragic suicide of the novel's young hero.Napoleon claimed to have read Goethe's book seven times, and years later Mary Shelley cited it as the first book read by the monster she created in Frankenstein. Boyle provides not only close and provocative readings of Goethe's literary works, but also a vivid portrayal of a convulsive age of revolution, including insights into Weimar court life, and accounts of other master thinkers like Lessing and Schiller.
Part social history, part literary criticism, this is biography on a grand scale--as sweeping and magnificent as the life it portrays.Boyle's work is accessible to anyone, and does not assume a prior knowledge of German history or literature, but it is also rigorous and original--a major work of scholarship.
Volume II, The Age of Renunciation, is in preparation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Keep Reading
When I started Vol. One, I realized I would need adjust to Boyle's prose style, and wanted to be sure it would be worth it (I am not an academic).I googled the work and found a review that said the same thing, and that also insisted it was well worth it.It was.I'm about to finish the second volumne and will be anxiously awaiting the third.The work is aptly named -- The Poet and the Age -- keep reading...

A superb biography
This is a magnificent biography. Nicholas Boyle, the Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge University, brilliantly portrays Goethe's first forty years, setting him in his social, political and cultural contexts.

Boyle is also superbly perceptive about Goethe's work and about his relationship to the intellectual and aesthetic currents in late 18th-century German and European culture. For example, he notes, "For absolute individualism belongs only in a theatre of inner conflict, not in a theatre of external conflict between worldly forces, and so is in the end the hand-maid of state absolutism."

Boyle also observes that Goethe had no religion: "There is no room for the fancies of reincarnation." Goethe simply acknowledges our mortality: "we are together like this only once."

Outstanding scholarly biography.
This is the first of three volumes (the third is still being written); it should go without saying that it is a scholarly biography, but based on some reviews, apparently it does need to be said.At some level, it is a reference book, but one can also enjoy it by reading selected sections.I am not a literature scholar by any means, and at first, this book intimidated me.The first chapter was excellent, but then I got bogged down in the next chapter due to deep discussion of literary theory and religious arguments.But I slogged on, and then was mesmerized by the half dozen pages describing the relationship between Goethe and Charlotte von Stein. Now I realize that one can enjoy this book by reading quickly those portions that are not so interesting and then read leisurely those portions that excite you.This 3-volume biography is clearly not for those who only enjoy drive-through fast-food restaurants, but for those who enjoy long drawn out multi-course banquets.One last thought:there are so many good things to say about this book, that to list any one thing is inadequate, but the fact that Nicholas Boyle includes the translation to every entry in German is wonderful.For those who say the book doesn't give a good picture of what Goethe was really like, or what his home life was like, after reading the section concerning 1775 - 1786, I come away feeling I know Goethe pretty well:his expertise in government made me think of Kissinger; his poetry, of course, rivals Shakespeare; his passion for women makes me think of any number of Romantics; and, his interest in science makes me think of Darwin.Maybe by the time I finish all three volumes I will realize I am completely wrong, but it's a good starting point.

This one sets a new standard.
There are two points of interest here, one being the life of Goethe, the second being the job that Boyle has done in presenting it.As to Boyle's work, I would be hard pressed to reconstruct the details of my own life with anything approaching the thoroughness provided here by Boyle.This is virtually a day to day account from birth to age 40, multidimensionally presented as Boyle meticulously places Goethe in the total context of his environment and provides us with the background to judge the development of the young Goethe as both artist and man.The faults of this biography, some of them existing by sheer volume and weight of content, are many and obvious.But, the imperfections are also in my view irrelevant to the tremendous accomplishment of the work as a whole.First, be informed that Boyle is a first rate intellect who is almost as able as his subject to a clarity of expression and penetrating insight that one finds only in the best minds.Boyle is possessed of the intellectual talent to provide a synthesis of man, history, environment, religious and philosophical ideas as well as standard universal human values and emotions, which makes this biography unique in its all encompassing presentation of its subject.It is apparent from the beginning that Boyle is attempting to provide to the reader the development in all phases as Goethe passes through age 40, which is when this book ends.Secondly, Boyle provides thorough scholarship and obvious effort.It seems that Boyle has read every published word written by Goethe and much that has been written about him, and in addition to the mere reading has studied and logically glued together and digested the life in all its dimensions.While many biographies purport the same, the extent taken here appears to me to be unmatched.The results of this highly energetic undertaking is basically to subsume whatever imperfections exist in the work to give us what undoubtedly is the best biography of Goethe,and, I suspect, also the best biography, period.This review would be incomplete without a word about my reaction to Goethe himself, for this is an author who sparks an unusual amount of attention on the other side of the Atlantic, and after reading of the first 40 years of his life I would say the stage had been set by then as to how Goethe would subsequently be called the German Shakespeare.One of the first to write a biography of Goethe in English was George Henry Lewes, better known as the husband of George Eliot of Middlemarch and Silas Marner fame.And, I must add, after reading Boyle's work that this is an entertaining and fascinating life backgrounded by a spectacular but little understood German culture of the time, as we witness Goethe, the determined agnostic attempt to find a meaning for his life without religion.How this is done in the first 40 years provides for the reader a rewarding, entertaining experience, and also much food for thought.

Fails to live up to the promise of its subject
One would be hard pressed to find a better subject for a literary biography than Goethe.Not only is he a major literary figure, one of those few who could be said to have truly shaped their national culture, not only is his enormous oeuvre is little read outside his home country, not only is he so marginal in the minds of English readers that his name is perpetually mispronounced and his most significant work, Faust, is continually assumed to be identical to other works of the same name, but--perhaps not so incredibly considering all else I have mentioned--there is absolutely no competition in the market for biographies of this amazing man.Which makes Nicholas Boyle's work all the more unfortunate, I'm afraid.

There can be no question that Boyle is well-familiar with Goethe's work, and the context of his long life.However, he communicates neither very well.A few bright moments poke through in the text, such as the fine description of the household in which Goethe grew up, but the reader generally finds himself at a loss when attempting to picture the type of life which Goethe lived.Esoteric religious concerns and theories about the effect of the German political situation on the souls of its people cloud what could have been a fascinating look at another time and place with distracting, and ultimately useless, complexities.Even worse is Boyle's approach to Goethe's work.One should have perhaps been warned by the author's decision to regiment "life" and "work" into alternate chapters that the work would be subjected to, and ultimately consumed by, a light but continual barrage of literary theory which, while it does not reach the absurd heights of which academia is often capable, manages to render the power of Goethe's poetry and fiction effectively lifeless.That is a formidable achievement indeed, and one which literary biographers, as a whole, should strive to avoid.

I am still waiting for a biography of Goethe worthy of him, a man whose literary relevance is unquestionable--Pushkin, Hugo and Shakespeare, perhaps, are the only others who can match him, and whoever writes the story of his life should attempt to show this truth, rather than obscure it unnecessarily, as Boyle has done.

Two stars, one for the minimum, and one for what it might have been. ... Read more

Product Description
The long-awaited first biography of the author of The Cancer Journals, an American icon of womanhood, poetry, African American arts, and survival.

During her lifetime, Audre Lorde (1934-1992) created a mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her childhood in Harlem in the conservative household of Caribbean-immigrant parents; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian poet; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature. Lorde's restless search for a spiritual home finally brought her to the island of St. Croix in 1986, where she died after a decade-long battle with breast cancer.

Drawing on the private archives of the poet's estate, personal journals, and interviews with members of Lorde's family, friends, and lovers, De Veaux assesses the cultural legacy of a woman who personified the defining civil rights struggles of the twentieth century. This landmark biography pays homage to one of the most courageous, singular voices of American letters. 16 pages of photographs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unafraid to Fight
Alexis DeVeaux presents a comprehensive account of self-described feminist, lesbian, and poet warrior, Audre Lorde.The author pulls together a myriad of published documents, unpublished journal entries by Audre Lorde herself, and a host of interviews with personal friends and family members to create a well documented look at the poet's life.The book is divided into two major sections called "lives."The first life begins prior to Audre's birth, and highlights some aspects of her parent's early life, their eventual marriage and move from the Caribbean to the United States.This family background helps readers understand Audre's nearly lifelong quest to come to terms with her relationship with her often emotionally detached parents.This portion of the book also details information about Audre's childhood, educational background, and young adult life.We learn about Audre's marriage to a white, gay, man and their eventual divorce and follow her process of "coming out" regarding her own lesbianism.Her long-term relationship with a white woman, Frances Clayton, and the challenges associated with raising a bi-racial son and daughter in a lesbian household during an era of rampant, overt racism and sexism was also discussed.DeVeaux also takes time to highlight some of Audre Lorde's flaws, thus providing a somewhat more balanced view of the author.Her professional career as a poet develops slowly, and the evolution of her writing career parallels the evolution of her political views and personal growth.

The second section of the book, "The Second Life," continues to explore her career development, chronicles her battles with cancer in more detail, and ends with her death. Audre Lorde supported freedom and equality for all, regardless of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation.However, because of her strong views and personal lifestyle, she often found herself on the fringes.Many white feminists were uncomfortable with her views on race, while those involved in the black power movement tended to be uncomfortable with her feminist ideology and her lesbianism.Yet she used her own struggles, particularly her battle with cancer, as a means to educate, motivate, and inspire.

I enjoyed WARRIOR POET and was impressed by Alexis DeVeaux's attention to detail and the time she spent helping readers understand the social and political climate of the times.There were times when I felt she went a little too far "setting the stage" and wanted to read more about Audre and less about other poets, or politics.Audre seemed to use her identity to take on very public battles for women's rights, gay rights, and so forth.But I found myself wanting to know more about how her children handled their mother's public persona.I also wondered how her very conservative, Catholic mother and her other siblings responded to Audre's lifestyle, and this issue was surprisingly never addressed.In spite of its sometimes academic feel, this is a must read for anyone that wants to learn more about an important literary figure.

Reviewed by Stacey Seay
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
... Read more

Product Description
Portraying a poet at the height of his creativity, a biography of Heinrich Heine, a popular German poet of the 1800s who revolutionized the language, shares the work of his last eight years when he was confined to his bed with a mysterious ailment. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Last Days of Heine
This is an absolutely great book and essential reading for anyone who loves Heinrich Heine--or would like to get to know who this legendary poet and wit really was.Above all, Pawel's wonderful work demonstrates all the ways in which the great man's spirit managed to overcome the terrible adversities with which he was forced to live. ... Read more

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A biography of the nineteenth-century American poet. ... Read more

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The definitive single-volume work on Shakespeare's life and plays by the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Why do Shakespeare's works continue to exert so strong an influence and have such lasting appeal? What do they have to offer modern readers and play-goers? Stanley Wells answers these questions in this wide-ranging and hugely readable critical survey of Shakespeare's career as a poet and playwright. The result of Wells' lifetime's work on Shakespeare's plays and poems, this original and entertaining study is both an ideal introduction to the writer and an invaluable companion for those renewing their acquaintance with his work either as readers or theatre-goers."A lively, comprehensive, eminently readable study of Shakespeare's plays ...There is an easy but sparky cross-flow between scholarly research and reference to contemporary theatre productions, and countless, fascinating dips into the tub of theatrical history ...This has diamond precision and would enlighten student, actor or general reader" Sunday Times ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more