| Life Work Contributor(s): Hall, Donald (Author) |
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ISBN: 0807071331 ISBN-13: 9780807071335 Publisher: Beacon Press OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2003 Annotation: Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love "The best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always." --Louis Begley, The New York Times "A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall's particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form." --Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times "Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall's Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work--as distinguished from labor--as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm." --Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe Donald Hall is the author of numerous prizewinning volumes of poetry, including The One Day, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, essays, children's books, and criticism. His new collection of short stories, The Willow Temple, will be published by Houghton Mifflin this spring. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2002043867 |
| Physical Information: 0.45" H x 5.52" W x 8.6" (0.39 lbs) 136 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The distinguished poet on the meaning of work, solitude, and love in this extraordinary nobility and wisdom (The New York Times) When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents' New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer and a life devoted to the liteary arts must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. However, he reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them he learned that the devotion to craft--be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure--creates its own special discipline and an absorbedness that no wage can compensate. In this sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness (Los Angeles Times), we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family's lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation. |