James P. White

The first blurb was so lengthy and quoted the entire first page, so that I thought the blurb was actually the story, a story about a publisher who was sent a manuscript.
Sad to say, that blurb was more exciting than the actual tale. Dewey and Alice are 16 years old when we first meet them circa 1966. The book covers not quite 2 years in their lives as they date and then decide to get married. The majority of the book covers their separate activities during the day of their evening wedding. It was excrutiating to read Dewey's self-centered, entitled behavior; his mother's and aunt's manipulativeness, and the lack of communication from his father & stepfather. Alice's change from being the smartest student in the school to daydreaming about how to please Dewey was degrading. The author seems to have a bone of contention with parent figures.
The only positive aspect of this book was it's short length (145 pages). The only reason it is rated as high as 2 1/2 is because it wasn't actively evil. Though, recognizing my depressed moood this day after reading it, I may have to reconsider that assessment.… (mais)

"And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice . . . For to miss the joy is to miss all." (From The Lantern Bearers by Robert Louis Stevenson as quoted by Christopher Isherwood in his commonplace book.

The quotation from Stevenson is placed as the epigraph to this selection of works by Isherwood. It is a selection that spans his lifetime as a writer from the early days in Berlin to the last days in Hollywood. In making the selections Don Bachardy and James P. White appropriately include the short novel A Single Man as the final selection. This is fitting because it is both the finest of Isherwood's novels and that one whose style and content delineate an ending to life and art in such a beautiful way. The other selections in the book include fictional, biographical, critical and spiritual writings that help the reader gain a picture of Isherwood's life from his own artistic creations. The result suggests how he imagined a world of love and freedom in an era when that life was hidden in ways that are difficult to comprehend in the twenty-first century. His friend Gore Vidal, to whom Isherwood dedicated A Single Man, states in his introduction: "throughout Christopher's life and work - and he made the two the same - he never ceased to attempt the impossible: to say exactly what a thing was and how it struck him in such a way that the reader might grasp it as he himself did, writer and reader as one in the ultimate collusive act of understanding."
This selection of his works captures that "collusive act" and presents it to readers everywhere.… (mais)