Reviewery - Hardcover

Ricks, Christopher B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590510194 ISBN 13: 9781590510193

Publisher: Other Press, 2002

Synopsis

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 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? 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Ricks is a Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, having previously taught at Oxford and Cambridge. He has published books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Beckett, as well as two collections of critical essays.

Review:

"Ricks combines quotation, revelation, and admiration so beautifully and sparely that one feels air has been let into the world." -- Katherine Powers,

... like perfect goodness, the perfect review is an impossible ideal. Christopher Ricks has come the closest to achieving it. -- LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Sunday, July 28, 2002

Into that dreary bog of intellectual terrain known as literary criticism comes whistling Christopher Ricks. -- THE SPECTATOR

Ricks takes seriously his duties as a sentinel of literature and wields his pen with determined force. -- NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, August 4, 2002

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1590510194
• ISBN 13: 9781590510193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400