Review by Choice Review
The Great Gatsby continues to capture attention, as evidenced by Baz Luhrmann's recent film adaptation and books such as Bob Batchelor's Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel (CH, Jun'14, 51-5439) and Sarah Churchwell's Careless People (CH, Sep'14, 52-0129). To this mix, Corrigan (Georgetown Univ.) adds her delightful and engaging contribution. She aims to write an accessible work "for a wide audience of educated nonspecialists"--e.g., people like those who listen to her book reviews on National Public Radio. Corrigan has taught The Great Gatsby for more than 30 years and communicates the intricate themes, structure, and complex characters with ease while retaining a high level of scholarship. She references both popular and literary examples, and her writing exhibits her easy confidence and enthusiastic personality. Her book includes chapters on, among other things, Fitzgerald's examination of social class and the geography in and around New York City and numerous biographical insights into Fitzgerald's life, family, companions, short fiction, and other work. Most interesting, Corrigan makes a strong case for reading the novel as a hard-boiled mystery, citing specific examples to support her argument. Well researched, the book includes a rich index. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Ryan M. Roberts, Lincoln Land Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN THE KINGDOM OF ICE: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides. (Anchor, $16.95.) In June 1881, two years into its Arctic expedition, the U.S.S. Jeannette's hull was crushed by ice, forcing the commander, George Washington De Long (1844-81), and his 32-man crew to abandon ship 1,000 miles north of Siberia. Sides's first-rate narrative recounts the horrors (crude amputations, madness, starvation) in the crew's desperate struggle to survive. LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932, by Francine Prose. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Told in a kaleidoscope of voices and inspired by a 1932 Brassai photograph of a lesbian couple at a Paris nightclub, Prose's novel of love, cross-dressing and espionage centers on a French cabaret performer and racecar driver who betrays her country to the Nazis. JOHN WAYNE: The Life and Legend, by Scott Eyman. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) More than one of Hollywood's most famous actors, Wayne (1907-79) was, and still is, a symbol of America itself: strong, forthright, ready to defend the homestead. Eyman goes behind the screen persona to reveal a man who was exuberant, guileless, even strangely innocent. THE VACATIONERS, by Emma Straub. (Riverhead, $16.) Straub's novel follows a well-heeled Manhattan family, the Posts, and their friends on a two-week vacation in Majorca. It's supposed to be a time of celebration - there's a 35th wedding anniversary, for starters - but their idyll is upended as secrets and rivalries come to light. "For those unable to jet off to a Spanish island this summer, reading 'The Vacationers' may be the next-best thing," Margo Rabb said in the Book Review. SUPREME CITY: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller. (Simon & Schuster, $19.99.) This entertaining history is led by an astonishing cast of characters, including Walter Chrysler and Duke Ellington, who helped turn 1920s New York into the world capital of culture and commerce. In SO WE READ ON: How "The Great Gatsby" Came to Be and Why It Endures (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16), Maureen Corrigan offers fresh perspectives on the Jazz Age novel's debt to noir and its profound commentaries on themes of race, class and gender. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. (Vintage International, $15.95.) "I've always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity," says Murakami's forlorn hero, a 36-year-old engineer in Tokyo who embarks on a series of reunions in the hopes of understanding why his tight-knit circle of high school friends suddenly shunned him years earlier. HOTEL FLORIDA: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, by Amanda Vaill. (Picador, $20.) Against the backdrop of a critical moment in history, Vaill traces the tangled wartime destinies of three couples: the bright young photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, and the devoted press officers Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. ?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (a take on the novel's last line: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past), Maureen Corrigan book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown University, and author of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005) attempts to fathom the perpetual fascination of F. Scott Fitzgerald's inexhaustible 1925 masterpiece. A slim yet saturated and gorgeously written book in which every element resonates, it is our Greatest American Novel and a book Corrigan unabashedly loves. Corrigan's immersion in Fitzgerald's novel inspires a dazzling literary appraisal of his assiduously polished, innovatively modern and urban language with its hard-boiled tone. And the word immersion is apt, given all the water imagery Corrigan highlights. She also quotes a letter from Fitzgerald to his daughter with the line: All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath. Like Nafisi, Corrigan pinpoints restlessness as a quintessential American quality, one she perceives in Fitzgerald's knowing depiction of New York City, the great mecca for dreamers with its promise of freedom, new identities, success, and unsentimental sex. She explains why she considers The Great Gatsby to be America's greatest novel about class as well as the vanquishing of God and the worship of idols in the aftermath of WWI, the fantasy that one can truly reinvent one's self, the grandeur of longing, and the spell of illusion. Fitzgerald, Corrigan writes, appreciated the doomed beauty of trying and roamed his own inner geography of yearning. Biographical currents run strongly throughout Corrigan's many-branched, stimulating, and beautifully crafted inquiry. Corrigan marvels over the almost eerie predictive quality of The Great Gatsby and makes sure we appreciate its overlooked humor, intricate patterns, and density of symbols, at every turn replenishing our amazement over its flow, sparkle, and shadow. She glides gracefully from the glimmering depths of the novel to the harsh light on land, where it was forgotten soon after it was published until it was gradually reclaimed, resurrected, and acclaimed, the subject for ongoing discussions both private and in classrooms and book groups, cinematic variations, and even merchandising. Corrigan's research was as intrepid as her analysis is ardent and expert, and she brings fact, thought, feelings, and personal experiences together in a buoyant, illuminating, and affecting narrative about one depthless novel, the transforming art of reading, and the endless tides that tumble together life and literature.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mixing criticism with memoir, NPR book critic Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading) contends that F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great American Novel is greater than we think. According to Corrigan, we were too young to appreciate The Great Gatsby when we read it in high school; we were dead to its themes of nostalgia and regret, overlooked its trenchant social critique, and mistook it for a love story. (Corrigan is adamant that we miss the point if we ask whether Daisy ever loved Gatsby.) To reintroduce and reassess a masterpiece, Corrigan visits the book's Long Island setting, Fitzgerald's grave, and a high school English class. Most illuminating, though, is her research into Gatsby's reception: in the Library of Congress, she investigates how the novel, unheralded on its publication in 1925, became part of the canon by the 1960s. (Fitzgerald's ghost can thank a few friendly critics and the paperbacks issued to GIs during WWII.) Today, Corrigan asserts, Gatsby still doesn't get its due. When she laments that Fitzgerald is the subject of fewer college seminars than are his modernist cohorts, such as James Joyce, her partisanship may seem blinkered. She makes a good case, however, that our very familiarity with Gatsby's Great American qualities has caused us to underrate it-and she does much to restore its stature. 13 b&w photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Book critic (NPR's Fresh Air), professor (literature, Georgetown Univ.), and author (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading) Corrigan pens a literary love letter with this information-packed, entertaining volume. The object of her affection, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, is examined from many angles-literary, sociological, cultural, personal, and historical. The intrepid Corrigan reads and rereads the novel; offers insights into its tropes and meaning; visits dusty archives, graveyards, and even her Queens, NY, high school alma mater; pores over correspondence; and watches all manner of filmed and staged Gatsbys (including what she calls a "noir version") in order to get at the novel's message and its appeal. She traces the book's arc from creation to near-obscurity to literary prominence. Her tone is lively and bright and her enthusiasm for the novel is infectious. You'll feel as if you're attending a lecture by your favorite prof or chatting with a brainy, bookish friend. VERDICT Bursting with intellectual energy and fun facts, this paean to the "great American novel" will appeal to fans of Corrigan's book critiques and Jazz Age scholars, and will, one hopes, impel readers to pick up the brief work for the first (or fourth, or 14th) time. [See "Books for the Masses," Editors' BEA Picks, LJ 7/14, p. 28.]-Liz French, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. 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
NPR book critic Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, 2005) offers an occasionally self-indulgent but mostly spot-on reading of F. Scott Fitzgeralds greatest noveland, according to some critics, the greatest novel in American literature.Those who knowThe Great Gatsbyonly through Baz Luhrmanns recent outing with Leonardo DiCaprio dont know the book at all, for, among other things, writes Corrigan, Luhrmann had a larger project, I think, to defang the novels class criticism. A fundamental uneasiness underliesGatsby: As rich as the title character is, he can never make his way into the much more rarefied world of the Old Rich; as rich as he is, he cannot ward off fate, justice, karma and what Corrigan wisely calls the Void. If Corrigan occasionally offers reading-group notes for the cashmere-sweater setyes, Zelda was a loon; yes, Scott was a bad drunk; yes, Hemingway was an assholeat other times, shes right on the case, turning up fascinating and sometimes-controversial gems: Could part of Gatsbys mystery lie in a mixed-race past? As to the race front, why is it that Fitzgerald has Tom Buchanan reading a book with the titleThe Rise of the Colored Empires, a book thinly modeled on one that Fitzgeralds own publisher had just released? Theres much flowing under the surface of Fitzgeralds novel, and though Corrigan puts too much emphasis on herself and not enough on Jay and company(I try to breathe deep and accept my powerlessness, as recommended by the on-line daily meditation program I sporadically log onto), she does a good job of pointing out what we should be paying attention to, which goes far beyond billboards and chandeliers.Corrigans close reading is welcome, though one hopes that readers will first revisit Fitzgeralds pages before dipping into hers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
