Jen's review
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
by Susan Cheever
Jen's review
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever
Jen's review
rating:
bookshelves:
prose
Copied from my blawg: "...focuses on the personal and economic lives of the writers, and it's really oddly organized. Cheever writes, at the beginning of the book, that she's revisiting each event or time period from the point of view of each of the people involved, but I didn't really get that sense so much as a distracting repetition, as if chapters were written as discrete pieces, and some odd jumping around in time. Also, she interjects the first-person in ways that seem really abrupt to me. I like the notion of incorporating memoir into such a book, but her asides ("Here's a picture of me in front of Emerson's house") don't really add anything for me, and they are really strangely integrated. The most significant theme here seems to be the economic: how folks like Bronson Alcott and H D Thoreau were able to seemingly abide by their principles of not owning land, living self-sufficiently, not marketing their work, etc., because Emerson footed the bills and made the c
