Word: knopf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reigning literary lion of post-Hemingway travel writers is V.S. Naipaul, who won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The Writer and the World (Knopf; 524 pages) brings together his best short work, most of which has been languishing uncollected for decades. A native of the tiny island of Trinidad, Naipaul is a travel writer almost by default--he is a foreigner everywhere he goes--and it's a privilege to look through his outsider's X-ray eyes at Mobutu's Zaire, or at a would-be revolutionary in Guyana, or at a holy man in Bombay...
...Kirkus dusts of its copy of "The Origin of the Species," giving "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place" by Janet Browne (Knopf; September 17) a starred review. "Continuing where 'Charles Darwin: Voyaging' (1995) left off, the British science historian completes her brilliant two-volume biography...For all his apparent desire to be left alone to lead the life of a country gentleman, Darwin was a shrewd self-promoter, vigorously publicizing his work even in the depths of a long illness that Browne suggests may have been brought on in part by his tireless labors...A richly detailed, vivid, and definitive...
...FROM RUSSO WITH LOVE: On July 16, Knopf will publish "The Whore's Child: and Other Stories" by Richard Russo, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for "Empire Falls." Kirkus and PW swoon, giving the book starred reviews. Says Kirkus, "Readers who loved such a roomy, generously plotted, and detailed novel as the Pulitzer-winning 'Empire Falls' won't be able to resist this first collection of seven stories by the Maine novelist...a wonderful distillation of Russo's gifts for crystal-clear narration, subtle character portrayal, and irrepressible humor... There may be more important writers around, but none...
Master of the Senate (Knopf), the third volume of Robert Caro's massive biography of Johnson, splendidly reassembles the U.S. Senate of those Eisenhower years, the arena of L.B.J.'s rapid rise to national power, from freshman Senator in 1949 to the youngest Senate Democratic leader ever, in four short years. Caro, whose great gifts are indefatigable legwork and a sense of historical drama and character, has a fine protagonist for his life's work. His Johnson, a man of Manichaean contraries, is now familiar--by turns Caligula and Lincoln, a narcissistic monster capable of immense personal cruelty and breathtaking...
...York-based writer Suketu Mehta's nonfiction book on Bombay will be published by Alfred A. Knopf next January...