Despite some fascinating vignettes and quotes, this is a somewhat disjointed attempt to write two books in one: a biographical collage of the Polish-Jewish-American Nobel laureate and a look at pre- and post-Holocaust Polish Jews and gentiles. A Polish historian and poet, Tuszynska has interviewed dozens of Singer's friends, critics, and other readers, mainly in the US and Israel, and captures the disagreeable as well as the admirably imaginative parts of his personality. For example, concerning his miserliness, she quotes Singer as having once told a waiter, ``I'd like to give you a larger tip, but my heart won't let me.'' Tuszynska offers some pungent insights into Singer's fiction, such as observing that he ``blasphemed, provoked, desecrated everything holy. Not from a wish to shock, but in the name of truth about the sorrows of human desires.'' Yet ultimately her mosaic of quotes and vignettes adds little to Janet Hadda's recent biography of Singer, and the memoirs of his son, Israel, and of his long-time assistant, Devorah Menashe Telushkin. Tuszynska's look at contemporary Poland and its Jews makes for interesting if depressing reading, revealing vitriolic anti-Semitism, strong misconceptions and remarkable ignorance about Jews among the Christian population (according to one poll, 25 percent of Poles believe their country is inhabited by 350,000 to 3.5 million Jews; the actual number is less than 20,000). Unfortunately, there is nothing here about the attempts by some Polish historians, Catholic priests, intellectuals, and others to gain a far more sophisticated understanding of the Polish-Jewish relationship—a project of which her own book is a part. Tuszynska also omits explanatory notes and sources for many of her quotes. Thus, she records without comment the entirely erroneous claim in one memoir that ``if a Jew's wife died, he had to sit at home in mourning for 14 days, eating once a day and not moving.'' While Tuszynska has gathered a great deal of colorful and revealing material, her two subjects aren't well integrated and are portrayed somewhat sketchily.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-12214-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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