The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Take a short trip through the mind of one of the most entertainingly bright writers of the 20th century. This selection of previously uncollected prose by Rebecca West, with its dazzling show of verbal and philosophical mastery, shows why West is still the secret weapon of newspaper editors, intellectuals and raconteurs the world over. Wielding a pen that’s as savage as it is brilliant, in these pages West has something genuinely original to say about love, war, pride and politics. Her insights throw new light onto great literary and political figures such as Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon. She thrashes a new path through the thorny thicket of feminism. She takes you on a truly bizarre excursion to wartime London. She even has something surprising and memorable to say about cats. In all, this wide-ranging, eclectic collection from a woman who has been called the finest of her generation is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel and sound smarter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although hardly a household name today, leftist and feminist Rebecca West (1892 1983) was world-famous in her lifetime, writing prolifically in many genres, feted for her New Yorker coverage of the Nuremberg trials and for her 1941 Yugoslavia history, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In the first of 22 uncollected essays and book reviews, West recalls a 1920s late-night boating expedition in Central Park accompanied by a silent, often sleeping foreigner who turns out to be Pirandello. In another piece, West describes the comedic antics of her cat Pounce, and, in a third, laments the space constraints imposed on book reviewers by newspapers. In her book reviews, West calls Dickens a nasty man; Solzhenitsyn a courageous and immensely gifted patriot; and Richard Nixon, she says, had a mind so unsophisticated and so narrowly educated that he has almost no mental context. Throughout, West is caustic and outspoken. But with a scanty introduction by Anne Bobby, who co-wrote and starred in a one-woman Off-Broadway show about West, and no background information about the pieces, these disjointed articles have the feel of leftovers that won't draw in new admirers.
