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A review by kwurtzel3
A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn
1.0
I can't for the life of me figure out how I hadn't reviewed this earlier -- I'm half-convinced I did and it somehow got deleted -- but here it is:
This is not a biography of Emily Dickinson. This is literary criticism masquerading as a biography, walking a thin tightrope between the two and falling quite frequently. And it's pretty terrible literary criticism, at that.
My main problem with it? There is no cohesion. The book as terrible organization; it skips from topic to topic with no transition. The author goes off on strange tangents that have only the most tenuous connections to Dickinson. When it does present any sort of biography, there is scant chronology. And it needed a decent copy editor to take a stab at this before publication, because it was riddled with grammatical errors (two I took note of: "a 150 pounds" [p. 69] and "St. John River's" [p. 73]). The writing was hideous and confusing. I'm still not sure what the author intended with this book, but I'm fairly sure it shouldn't have gone out to the wider world.
Overall: 1/10.
This is not a biography of Emily Dickinson. This is literary criticism masquerading as a biography, walking a thin tightrope between the two and falling quite frequently. And it's pretty terrible literary criticism, at that.
My main problem with it? There is no cohesion. The book as terrible organization; it skips from topic to topic with no transition. The author goes off on strange tangents that have only the most tenuous connections to Dickinson. When it does present any sort of biography, there is scant chronology. And it needed a decent copy editor to take a stab at this before publication, because it was riddled with grammatical errors (two I took note of: "a 150 pounds" [p. 69] and "St. John River's" [p. 73]). The writing was hideous and confusing. I'm still not sure what the author intended with this book, but I'm fairly sure it shouldn't have gone out to the wider world.
Overall: 1/10.