Norrie epstein biography for kids
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The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard
"Incidentally, the 'Friendly' of the title isn't intended to presume a chumminess that would turn Shakespeare into a ‘household pet’ (to use Shaw’s expression)—he can on occasion be shockingly brutal. What I wanted to convey was the real Shakespeare—not the academic, the watered down, or the air-brushed one presented to tourists and students but the man himself and the people who spend their lives studying him and practicing his art.”
The Goods:
-The author seems to be fairly open to praise and disparagement. Not too many cloying “Shakespeare is the greatest thing ever” moments. She tries to point out triumphs and the failures.
-Great little short summaries of some of the plays, with “things to look for,” “great renditions,” “history of…” and so on. These will be very helpful should I need them.
-Nice explanations of the types of plays Shakespeare did and why they’
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THE FRIENDLY DICKENS
In the sort of labor of love Dickens inspires, Epstein, author of The Friendly Shakespeare (not reviewed) and sometime university lecturer, has written her well-informed and fängslande pop reference for those sick of the annual maladaptations of A Christmas Carol and students who have encountered them only as “textbooks, not novels.— Dickens biographers and scholars have been hard at work since Edmund efternamn to dismantle Dickens’s respectable Victorian facade, usually with Freudian tools, but The Friendly Dickens balances demystification with erudition as it encapsulates his prodigious work and literally Dickensian life. Peppered throughout are intriguing and odd bits of information, culled from a wide variety of sources, so that the casual browser will learn Dickens’s robust walking speed (4.8 m.p.h.), the total number of characters he created (13,143) and all those he killed off before the age of 25 (over a dozen), and the amount of dung deposited on London str
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Really, He's a Guy You Might Like
The Friendly Shakespeare:
A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard
Norrie Epstein (Viking, 1993)
Shakespeare has a prankish look in Mark Summers' illustration gracing the hardback cover of Norrie Epstein's book The Friendly Shakespeare. The playwright's right hand holds a quill in a way that indicates he had just written something silly or cynical, or maybe it's a sly riposte he's awfully proud of. The slight grin forming underneath his handlebar mustache and the gleam in his eyes tell you he can't wait for you to read it. Summers' drawing offers no hint of deity or historical perspective in his Shakespeare, and as such it is the ideal jacket cover for Epstein's lighthearted yet respectful summary of all things Shakespeare.
Epstein's book is not a biography. It is not a collection of critical essays. It is not a study guide for students, nor is it “a coffee table book extolling the beauties of the Bard with glossy pict