Reviewery - Hardcover

Ricks, Christopher B.

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590510194 ISBN 13: 9781590510193

Publisher: Handsel Books, 2002

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This book collects fifty of Christopher Ricks' reviews from newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic—TLS, London Review of Books, The New Statesman, The Sunday Times (London), The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and others—to several of which he has been a regular contributor. The book's five sections range around the twentieth century, addressing major figures in biography (Ackroyd, Edel, Ellmann, Mailer), poetry and fiction (Heaney, Hemingway, Milosz, Naipaul, Pound), literary criticism and theory (Davie, Empson, Fiedler, Fish, Leavis, Sartre), sociology and cultural studies (Goffman, Milgram, Steiner), and various non-literary arts (the Beatles, Steinberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Wiseman).

The questions at the heart of Ricks' work as reviewer have always been essential ones: What can we learn from this book? How good and how pleasing is it? How might it have been better? Radiantly intelligent, learned, witty, and rigorously attentive to how words are used and to the arguments they are used to make, Christopher Ricks is for many the best critic now writing in English.

"Reading Professor Ricks' comments and observations convinces me that he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."
–W.H. Auden

"Like perfect goodness or perfect disinterestedness, the perfect review is an impossible ideal. Of all the people I know, Christopher Ricks has come the closest to achieving it."
–Wendy Lesser, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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About the Author:

Christopher Ricks is a Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and the codirector of the Editorial Institute. He was formerly Prof. of English at the universities of Bristol and Cambridge.He has published books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T.S.Eliot, and Beckett, and edited the standard edn of Tennyson. He lives in Boston and Gloucestershire.

Synopsis:

Ricks (humanities, Boston U.) has commented on English literature from many eras, but the 50 reviews and review-essays selected for this collection are all concerned with writers and endeavors of the 20th century. One section looks at theater, film, and other media. Only names are indexed. Annotatio

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