Review by New York Times Review
FACTFULNESS By Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Rosling, who died last year, was an expert on international health who lamented the information bubbles that he feared surrounded too many of us. Burst them, he argues in this book, and our general pessimism about the state of the world will also ease - things are much better than they seem. Neapolitan chronicles By Anna Maria Ortese. (New Vessel, paper, $16.95.) This collection of writing and reportage about Naples was a major inspiration for Elena Ferrante. Ortese's portrait of the Italian city just after World War II is of a place of poverty and desperation, lear By Harold Bloom. (Scribner, $24.) Bloom's understanding of Lear as a character has shifted with age, allowing him to appreciate aspects of the old king he couldn't see at 17 or 40. This focused study showcases the erudition of one of our most eminent Shakespeare scholars, the kremlin ball By Curzio Malaparte. (New York Review, paper, $15.95.) This is a glimpse of 1920s Moscow, among the Soviet high society It's the aftertaste of the revolution. Published posthumously, Malaparte's court chronicle captures Stalin as the surveyor of every intrigue and scandal from his nightly opera box. the view from flyover country By Sarah Kendzior. (Flatiron, paper, $12.99.) A St. Louis-based journalist, Kendzior has been called "a Cassandra in Trumpland," analyzing in these short essays the social trends and discontent in Middle America that built the president's base. "When I drove to Spring Green, Wis., for a reporting trip recently, I expected to see Frank Lloyd Wright's influence sprinkled throughout the bucolic valley that he considered his home, a place I hadn't visited since I was a child. I hadn't realized that Wright's inspiration seemed to touch nearly everything there: the design of houses tucked into grassy slopes, a former bank's drive-through lanes, the prairie-style sconces in the hallways of a tiny elementary school. So when I returned home, I (perhaps a little belatedly) turned to frank lloyd wright, a 2004 biography by Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. Hers is one of many biographies on Wright, whose cinematic, brilliant life makes for incredibly rich reading. Huxtable skillfully weaves together the tales of Wright as a seductive, obsessive young architect in booming late-19th-century Chicago, where he rubbed shoulders with Jane Addams and Daniel Burnham; his scandalous personal behavior and indifference to his small children (he apparently loathed the sound of the word 'papa'); and the debts, broken relationships, tragedy and lasting acclaim that followed." - JULIE BOSMAN, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the outset of this pithy exegesis of King Lear, Bloom (Falstaff: Give Me Life) describes the play's title character as, along with Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's "most challenging personalities," in part because "his violent expressionism desires us to experience his inmost being, but we lack the resources to receive that increasing chaos." As in other books in his Shakespeare's Personalities series, Bloom guides the reader scene by scene through the play, quoting long but well-chosen swaths of text and interjecting commentary that reveals the nuances of Shakespeare's word choices-for example, repeated references to nature, natural, and the unnatural, whose ominous repetition throughout the text foreshadows the depths of degradation to which Lear and the other characters will descend by the play's end. He is also deft at bringing out dramatic contrasts between characters, notably the juxtaposition of the Earl of Gloucester's loyal but naive son Edgar and his devious "bastard" son Edmund, as well as parallels between characters-for example, between Lear and Gloucester, both of whom are betrayed by their children, or between Cordelia and the Fool, each of whom is chastised for speaking honestly. Bloom's short, superb book has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study, and the author knows when to let Shakespeare and his play speak for themselves. Agent: Glen Hartley, Writers' Representatives. (Apr. 2018) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bloom (Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale Univ.) has written more than 40 books and has edited countless others. Following the format of earlier titles in this series, the author devotes short chapters (with copious excerpts from the play's text) to William Shakespeare's King Lear and the themes of the play. King Lear is concerned with nothingness; though it contains a number of biblical references, ultimately, religion is not a main motif. Rather, images of horror and cruelty predominate throughout the drama. The critic devotes considerable attention to the character of Edgar as well as to the King; Edgar's development through various stages of the play and his changes of persona are thoroughly studied. Throughout, Bloom takes on the role of a sympathetic reader who cares deeply about Shakespeare's way of depicting character and how the dramatist shows the evolving themes of the tragedy. There are no references or bibliography, the focus here being on Bloom's feelings and interpretation, not what other commentators have thought about Lear. VERDICT For all library collections. Highly recommended for any reader or drama lover who admires Shakespeare in general and the character of Lear in particular.-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. 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
The noted critic and English professor digs deep to uncover what makes this play so profound.After books on Falstaff and Cleopatra, the third installment in Bloom's (Humanities/Yale Univ.) Shakespeare's Personalities series takes on King Lear, whom, along with Prince Hamlet, is one of "Shakespeare's most challenging personalities." These two plays are the "ultimate dramas yet conceived by humankind." High praise indeed from the prolific author who, now in his late 80s, wrestles with the complexities of another man also in his 80s. Bloom brings this dark tale of a king in search of love to life via his incisive close reading of the text. As he writes, King Lear is the "most ironic of all tragedies, surpassing even Hamlet." Noting all the times the word "nothing" is used, this "nihilistic play" leaps "beyond hope, into nothingness." Lear has an "enormous need to be loved," especially by his youngest daughter, Cordelia. Her sisters, Goneril and Regan, Bloom writes, are "monsters of the deep, preying upon their victims, and at last on one another." The author does a fine job of explicating Edgar, the "just and rational avenger." In the first two quartos of the play, Bloom notes, Edgar is given special prominence in the play's lengthy title. After Lear, he's the "crucial personality in the drama." From Poor Tom to serving man to peasant to messenger to masked knight, "in all of Shakespeare, there is nothing like these astonishing metamorphoses." The "ultimate atrocities" in the play are Cornwall's gouging of Gloucester's eyes, enacted before us, and the hanging of Cordelia, done offstage. "In what must be the shattering beyond all measure," writes Bloom, "in Shakespeare and indeed all Western literature, Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms."A measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
