标题: Two Book Reviews of the Same Book [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 7-14-2016 16:25 标题: Two Book Reviews of the Same Book (1) Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hardship on the Range. Hamilton survived tornadoes, wolves, panthers and wild hogs. She also survived her husband's drunken binges and the loss of four children. Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2016 http://www.wsj.com/articles/hardship-on-the-range-1468363352
(book review on Mary Mann Hamilton, Trials of the Earth. The true story of a pioneer woman. Little Brown, 2016)
Note:
(a) In paragraph 1 of the review, the reviewer reminisces her grandmother words: "You come of frontier stock." In the last paragraph of the review, the reviewer comments Ms Hamilton's descendants: "they come from frontier stock." The preposition "of" is the same as "from" in this context.
(b) " 'Trials of the Earth,' Mary Mann Hamilton's newly republished memoir about her life in the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. * * * Hamilton, who died in 1936, wrote her book in the early 1930s and submitted it to a writing competition sponsored by the New York publishing house of Little, Brown. It didn't win. Eight decades later, Little, Brown reconsidered its rejection and has now given 'Trials of the Earth' new life with this belated publication. It probably helped that the University of Mississippi Press had discovered a copy of Hamilton's rejected manuscript and published it in 1992 to positive reviews."
(i) Trials of the Earth. The autobiography of Mary Hamilton. University of Mississippi Press, 1992.
(A) University of Mississippi Press is the official name, not University of Mississippi Press.
(B) The 1992 book is out of print. Hence the republication.
(ii) Ms Hamilton was born in 1866. See (2).
(iii) Her husband's name was Frank Hamilton. So Mann was her maiden name.
(c) "Hamilton's husband was a logger, and she accompanied him into the remote, undeveloped territory of the Mississippi Delta, where 'cane, undergrowth, blackberry briars, grape and poison oak and muscadine vines' all grew to enormous size, forming a 'great tangled mat.' As she describes, 'a man couldn't get through any of the woods without a compass in one hand and a cane axe in the other to blaze every foot of the way.' "
(i)
(A) briar (n; variant: brier; etymology) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/briar
(B) brier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier
("Briar (thicket) (also spelt brier), common name for a number of unrelated thorny plants that form thickets")
(ii) For poison oak, see Toxicodendron diversilobum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicodendron_diversilobum
(section 1 Distribution)
(iii) Vitis rotundifolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_rotundifolia
(or muscadine)
(d) "The plum pudding that Hamilton made every year for her husband’s birthday on Nov 18 had to last through Thanksgiving and Christmas."
Christmas pudding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_pudding
(in Britain, Ireland; " is sometimes known as plum pudding * * * Despite the name 'plum pudding,' the pudding contains no actual plums due to the pre-Victorian use of the word 'plums' as a term for raisins. The pudding is composed of many dried fruits")
(e) "Today some of her [Hamilton's] descendants still live in Mississippi. (Among them is a former governor, Ronnie Musgrove.)"
"This book differs from the many accounts and journals we've read of westward-wending pioneers * * * Mary Hamilton's family wasn't trying to go anywhere; skilled and vigorous, eager to settle but dislodged from one home after another, they simply struggled to survive.
"Her father had died. "Obeying her mother's deathbed injunction, at the age of 18 [1884] she married Frank Hamilton, an Englishman older than she.
"Though she longed for a proper home, the Hamiltons moved often, dogged by bad luck and losses, not marching toward a manifest destiny, simply looking for a reasonable living. They settled finally in the Mississippi Delta that Faulkner would later write about so elegiacally.
"We must also forgive, though a deeper woman might have overcome the prejudices of her time, Mary Hamilton's blindness to blacks as genuine human players in the same rigged game [which = game] she and her husband were caught in, and, in one incident, her blindness to Jews.
Note:
(a) elegiac (adj): http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elegiac
(b) "she was a fairly ordinary woman, but one whom necessity and native grit teased to a grand self-possession and authority."
(c) "There is a frame that distinguishes this memoir from so many others and gives it a context in time. A young Mississippi writer named Helen Dick Davis met the aged, much reduced Mary Hamilton 'on a raw November day' in 1931 at the home of one of Mary's surviving daughters in the Delta sawmill town of Philipp. An extraordinary dream that urged the older woman to seize the moment before death took her finally persuaded Hamilton to set down her memories in a journal. Davis * * * must have labored as hard to make a viable memoir as Mary Hamilton ever did cooking in her kitchen, to judge by the sample journal pages at the back of "Trials of the Earth." Accurate spelling, punctuation and a clear hand are almost equally lacking. The manuscript was sent off to a writers' competition sponsored by Little, Brown in 1933, didn't win and disappeared. A carbon copy was found in July 1991 in a box tucked underneath Davis's granddaughter's bed. It was submitted to the University Press of Mississippi, and Davis saw the copy-edited version before she died in February of this year at the age of 92. The finished book includes a few pages of Helen Dick Davis's own journal and makes us wish for more. Two kinds of labor are thus evident in 'Trials of the Earth,' what Mary Hamilton experienced and what Helen Davis wrote. Both represent lives well lived, and it is stirring to enter them after all these years."
(i) frame (n): "2.2 An enclosing section of narrative, especially one which foregrounds or comments on the primary narrative of a text" http://www.oxforddictionaries.co ... rican_english/frame
(ii) Philipp, Mississippi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp,_Mississippi
(map)
(iii) copyedit (vt): "edit (text to be printed) by checking its consistency and accuracy" http://www.oxforddictionaries.co ... an_english/copyedit