Sunday, February 17, 2008

Today's Inquirer reviews ...

... yes, this will continue to be feature of this blog.

... Carlin Romano really doesn't like John Edgar Wideman's latest: Too little bio, and too much stale racial rage.

... but Mary Dixie Carter is impressed by a new biography of Ezra Pound: Irritating, captivating, quirky Pound. (Funny, I knew Pound had gone to Penn, but I hadn't realized he grew up in Wyndmoor, just outside Philly.)

... Vernon Clark likewise is impressed by Major Jackson's Hoops: Poetic nuances of Phila. (I regard this as one of my more inspired assignments: Vernon is a reporter who knows the city as well as anybody.

... Jesse Freedman is not altogether happy with Eric G.Wilson's Against Happiness: Celebrating melancholy, the essential artist's muse .

... but Katie Goldstein rather likes Arturo Pérez-Reverte's latest: Photographer becomes subject.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:28 PM

    Ezra Pound did not grow up in Wyndmoor, but WynCOTE. His house is one block from mine, on Fernbrook Avenue. Have I never shown it to you? I can see the tip of his roof from my house (here on Cliff Terrace, we're at the bottom of a cliff -- it used to be a quarry here). My husband and I often muse on the fact that Ezra, as a teen, would have watched our house being built in 1898. Indeed, it must have been noisy from his perspective.

    H.D. lived a couple of miles away from here and they, too, were friends, then met William Carlos Williams at Penn (where he was studying medicine).

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  2. Oops. Sorry about that, Susan, and no, you've never shown it to me. H.D.'s family, I thought, moved to Upper Darby when her father became astronomy professor at Penn. She went to Friends Central

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