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9 Obras 351 Miembros 9 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Robert Roper's journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, and other publications. His book Fatal Mountaineer won the 2002 Boardman Tasker Prize. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore and California.

Obras de Robert Roper

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
male

Miembros

Reseñas

This book is entitled “... in America,” but I think it could with equal accuracy be called Nabokov and Lolita, since it is very much about the preparation for, production, and reception of his great American novel. Roper not only immersed himself in the vast body of writing the Russian emigré created, as well as the flood of secondary literature about him, he also retraced Nabokov’s discovery of his new homeland, following him not only to the academic and literary centers Manhattan, Cambridge, Palo Alto and Ithaca, but also the many roads he and his wife drove on their frequent summer automobile trips out west, pursuing Nabokov’s passion, lepidoptery. It was interesting to learn that for months at a time, his immersion in this avocation -- both in the field and at a desk in museums back east -- was so complete that it crowded out his writing. Roper calls himself a Nabokovian, but this doesn’t prevent him from differentiating among the author’s books, making it clear they are not all great. Roper’s own writing is good, with a slightly jarring tendency to slip into slangy cliché. Edmund Wilson, for instance, “had wised up" about Stalinist Russia (p. 44), whereas Nabokov’s agent “had wanted him to write something over the American plate” (p. 191). Nevertheless, a very good read.… (más)
 
Denunciada
HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy provided by NetGalley, and I have submitted my comments to the publisher via that web site.

The biggest crime in this book is the one the author commits against his readers, forcing us to slog through both over-intellectual character studies and truly gruesome details of tortured female murder victims, only to culminate with an unbelievable and baffling "surprise" ending. The writing smacks of highbrow misogyny, which is something the literary world has enough of already. Not recommended.… (más)
 
Denunciada
librarianarpita | May 14, 2015 |
Now the Drum of War is an engaging book that focuses on a specific period in the life of Walt Whitman -- the period of the Civil War when he was both most prolific and most most artistically and emotionally mature. And it iss a beautiful portrait of the man's larger-than-life personality. His charisma and attraction. The way he channeled his emotions and desires into a full-on embrace of life. If there was ever a person who lived as he wrote, it was Whitman at this period.

It is also sensitive and touching depiction of his work in the hospitals caring for, being a companion, to the wounded soldiers of the Union Army. And between the author's accounts of Whitman "on the homefront" and his brother George on the front lines a really good account of the emotional life of the soldier -- not as a military tool, but simply as a young man with a gun desperate for letters from home. Not to mention a wonderful account of the emotional life of that family left at home, waiting for news of him. The book made me think of the first section of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, devoted to Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the way it talked about what the Civil War meant, how it was felt, rather than how it was conducted or how it was won and lost.

I will say that if you are a person who knows little about Whitman, the man, (as I was and am) then Now the Drum of War is perhaps not the best place to start. The scope of the book is too narrow, too tightly focused on a few specific, albeit paramountly important, years in the life of a man whose very nature tends to explode the confines of whatever boundaries and definitions we put around him. So I was conscious, while reading, of a lack of context that was wholly due to my own ignorance as a reader. I didn't feel able to read objectively or critically--I was forced to accept, for example, the author's own perspective on Whitman's mother, (about whom there are many theories) and his own interpretations of Whitman's poetry in the light of particular events like the assassination of Lincoln. But I felt the need to accept them with reservations, always uncomfortably aware of my own inadequate knowledge, and how much I was taking on faith, as it were.

For this reason the next books I picked up were Whitman's own poetry and essays, and Justin Kaplan's acclaimed biography. And let me tell you, that has been a couple months of real delight and struggle. But I had the feeling I should have read them first.
… (más)
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Denunciada
southernbooklady | 5 reseñas más. | Oct 16, 2014 |
In December 1862 Walt Whitman saw the name of his brother George, a Union soldier in the 51st New York Infantry, listed among the wounded from the battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the Washington D.C. area to search the hospitals and encampments for his brother. During this time Walt Whitman gave witness to the wounds of warfare by listening gently to the injured soldiers as they told their tales of battle. Whitman often spent time with soldiers recovering from their injuries in the Patent Office Building (now home to the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum), which had been converted into a hospital for much of the Civil War. Walt Whitman's experiences in Washington deeply affected his life and work and informed the core of his writing.

Robert Roper's "Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War" is an indispensable account of Whitman's time in Washington during the war. Roper's book examines the Civil War through the experiences of Walt Whitman and provides new findings on the care of wounded soldiers both on the battlefield and in large hospitals in the capital and its environs. Roper also focuses on Whitman's emotional relationships with the wounded troops he nursed. Walt Whitman journeyed from New York to find his wounded brother George and in the process Walt became a brother to thousands of wounded comrades. Whitman's volunteer work as a nurse during the Civil War is a story that needs to be told in all mediums.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
greggchadwick | 5 reseñas más. | May 31, 2012 |

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Obras
9
Miembros
351
Popularidad
#68,159
Valoración
3.8
Reseñas
9
ISBNs
41
Idiomas
4

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