Review by New York Times Review
CHOKEHOLD: Policing Black Men, by Paul Butler. (New Press, $26.95.) A law professor and former federal prosecutor argues in this readable and provocative book that releasing prisoners who are not dangerous would free up resources to combat the segregated poverty that underlies our criminal justice system. LESS, by Andrew Sean Greer. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $26.) On the eve of his 50 th birthday and a former lover's wedding, a mediocre novelist takes refuge in literary invitations that enable him to travel around the world. The novel is smart, humane and laugh-out-loud funny. THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM, by Edward Luce. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) Luce, a columnist for The Financial Times, employs fluid prose and telling statistics to argue that the tradition of liberty and democracy, and by extension the open international and economic system that has characterized the Western world since 1945, is under mortal threat. THE ANSWERS, by Catherine Lacey. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Funny, eerie and idea-dense, Lacey's novel features a woman hired by a team of researchers to perform the transactions that make up a romantic relationship for a famous actor. She is "Emotional Girlfriend," bound to affirm his opinions and text him often. WHO IS RICH?, by Matthew Klam. Illustrated by John Cuneo. (Random House, $27.) The protagonist of this challenging novel, a middle-aged illustrator, is a conflicted adulterer. Klam agilely balances an existentially tragic story line with morbid humor and self-assured prose. LIGHTS ON, RATS OUT: A Memoir, by Cree LeFavour. (Grove, $25.) This gritty account of a woman's struggle with self-abuse describes nearly gothic suffering. It is also a love story about a dedicated and gifted analyst and his difficult but equally gifted patient. Courageous and unsettling, LeFavour's memoir is infused with humor and wry insight as well as pain. THE LAST LAUGH, by Lynn Freed. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Three friends, nearing 70, decide to spend a year in Greece in this darkly, mordantly funny novel. There they encounter sexy locals and their angry wives, while people from their pasts keep turning up. HOUSMAN COUNTRY: Into the Heart of England, by Peter Parker. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) This critical biography attributes Housman's contemporary popularity to his ability to evoke a timeless countryside while England was becoming increasingly urban. THE CRIME WRITER, by Jill Dawson. (Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99.) Dawson's novel uses the life of Patricia Highsmith to probe the territory between reality and fantasy that so fascinated her. Told in both the first- and the third-person, it is full of pomo fun. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It took almost three years to sell the 500-copy first edition of poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896) 63 poems that by 1967 had become the third-largest source of book titles in English. A collection taken to war more often than any other poetry by the soldiers of WWI and WWII, it also had more of its contents set to music than any other modern poetry collection, and had spurred the revival of English love for the countryside that made hiking the popular passion it remains today. After devoting the longest chapter to The Man and His Book, in which he fully illuminates Housman's thwarted homosexual love and subsequent lifelong repression (which his out brother Laurence disputed but without proof), Parker tells the stories of the book's massive influences on other poets, composers, and England's and the English-speaking world's image of England. He also notes that soldiers of the erstwhile colonies embraced A Shropshire Lad as ardently as their counterparts in the mother country. Writing with elegance and an informed knowledge of the subject both deep and broad, Parker contributes a cultural history that itself is as distinguished a work of literature as its focus, a book often considered the first great classic of modern literature in English.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Few people today read A.E. Housman, but his most famous book of poetry, A Shropshire Lad, was a bestseller, going through 48 editions in the 50 years after its 1896 publication. In this insightful but disappointingly dreary critical biography, Parker (Isherwood: A Life Revealed) attempts to recover Housman for a new generation by illustrating his significance for early 20th-century England. Engaging in close readings of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, Parker shows clearly how Housman's Romantic poetry creates a rural world of familiar lands and fields that its modern urban readers looked back on with a nostalgic longing for home. The themes of the poems-mortality, romantic longing, exile-also evoke a wistful desire to return to a certain time and place. So popular were Housman's poems in playing to a shared sense of national identity that several of the most famous composers of the day-Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, among others-set them to music. English artists such as Morrissey continue to sing Housman's praises. Regrettably, Parker's long-winded study, delivered with a punishing level of detail, is not likely to drive newcomers to Housman to read A Shropshire Lad, despite the collection being reproduced in full in an appendix. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Parker (The Old Lie; Isherwood) explores the origins and influence of A.E. Housman's poetry collection A Shropshire Lad (1896). For Parker, as for many other readers, this work embodies Englishness, with its focus on the rural and its elegiac tone. The poems also encode Housman's homosexuality; Parker demonstrates that the word "lad" was itself sexually charged. The Latinist Housman also drew on the classics. In addition to analyzing Housman's poetry, Parker describes his influence on subsequent generations, especially World War I writers. Even though Lad predates that event, Housman was regarded as a war poet because of his portrayals of doomed youth. Composers, too, have drawn on the work, and Parker devotes a chapter to analyzing various musical treatments, showing that the poems' allure continues into the 21st century. Parker occasionally overeggs the custard with excessive examples of the English love for the countryside and exhaustive listings of Housman-inspired creations. VERDICT An enjoyable and informative account of a much-loved collection.-Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro © Copyright 2017. 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 jolly good nostalgic walk through Housman country.British poet Ted Hughes described Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) as "the most perfect expression of something deeply English." He could also have been describing Housman's greatest work, the poetry collection A Shropshire Lad. In this capacious, generous work of literary and cultural history, Parker (The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, 2009, etc.) sets out to prove Hughes' statement. In 1896, when Housman, then 37, was a professor of Latin, he self-published 500 copies of his small volume of 63 poems. In its first year, it sold only 381 copies in Britain and the United States combined. Because he wanted to make it affordable, Housman declined all royalties. By 1911, it had sold 13,500 copies and has never been out of print, becoming "one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the language." George Orwell claimed to have memorized the whole book when he was at Eton. Parker describes it as a "gazetteer of the English heart." The author first offers a lengthy, affectionate biography of Housman, comparing him to Thomas Hardy, "another writer who straddled the Victorian and modern ages." Housman composed much of the book while taking long, solitary walks in Hampstead Heath, and it was inspired by his unrequited love for a fellow university student, Moses Jackson. Parker next takes on the English landscape, explaining why Housman chose Shropshire for his setting. For Housman, it "was our western horizon, which made me feel romantic about it." After a fascinating disquisition on the popular association of walking and poetry, Parker shows how extensively the poems influenced English musice.g., Vaughan Williams, Morrissey and The Smithsand how the book became an important companion for English soldiers. The author concludes by providing numerous examples of Housman's and the poems' appearances in modern culture (Inspector Morse, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons) as well as the complete text of A Shropshire Lad. Delightful, enchanting, and learned. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
