Adam and Eve and the City: Selected Nonfiction - Softcover

Gray, Francine Du Plessix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671668307 ISBN 13: 9780671668303

Publisher: Holiday House, 1988

Synopsis

Book by Gray, Francine Du Plessix

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Starting with an article about Philip Berrigan pouring blood on draft files in 1967 and ending with a background piece on the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, critically acclaimed novelist Gray (Lovers and Tyrants and October Blood brings together 20 of her essays that originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Under "Politics and Salvation" she gathers meditations on the anti-Vietnam War movement, Nixon's second inaugural celebration, Harvey Cox's "spiritual gyrations," Thomas Merton's life and thought, Rennie Davis and the Perfect Master Maharaj Ji, and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon. Under "Homelands" she groups her reactions to Teddy Kollek's Jerusalem, a safari in Kenya and Tanzania, the secession movement in Hawaii's "sugar-coated fortress," and a gathering of her family in France. "Women's Lives" contains her impressions of writings by Margaret Atwood, Jane Bowles and Madame de Sevigne. She reviews Wilfrid Sheed's biography of Clare Boothe Luce and the career of Coco Chanel, that "hard-core collaborationist," and recalls life at Black Mountain College under poet Charles Olson. There are also chapters of Gray's "ongoing dialogue with Him/She/It Out There," a dialogue fittingly now given more permanent form here.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Gray's impeccable style and fine critical eye are shown to their best advantage in this eclectic but even collection of prose pieces. A novelist as well as an essayist who fixes her thoughtfully reflexive vision on a variety of subjects, Gray transposes generic conventions to produce a topically familiar yet astonishingly revelatory cultural chronicle. Recording recent American political history and journeys to Kenya, Hawaii, and Jerusalem; examining the life and work of such diverse personalities as Margaret Atwood, Clare Boothe Luce, and Madame de Sevigne; and exploring her own history as a child of a member of the French Resistance, Gray remains committed to representing the dispossessed. A politically cogent and highly readable cultural document. Mollie Brodsky, English Dept., Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Holiday House
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0671668307
• ISBN 13: 9780671668303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400