An inviting exchange of stories and ideas across two continents and half a tumultuous decade.
A conscientious objector flees enlistment in Vietnam by making a new life in Sweden in this posthumous autobiographical collection.
Bruce Proctor’s memoir, compiled and edited by his younger brother, poet and novelist Alan Robert Proctor (Adirondack Summer, 2013, etc.), revisits the late 1960s: the horrors of total war in Vietnam, the unpredictable tides of the American counterculture, and the feeling of being young in a mad world. “Not fear of death, but fear of not being able to live while taking part in killing” is what drives Bruce to renounce his citizenship and leave the country when the National Guard is called up in 1968. “I was born to be a Swede,” Bruce declares on arrival in the Scandinavian country, and he’s besotted by the ease of life and the clear summer light. But the nights grow long, work is hard to find, and whiskey is too easily available. He works in the warehouse of a chemical plant, then as a lumber hand, then by driving a taxi. He goes back to school to earn a master’s degree but eventually sours on academia. Finally, in 1972, he and his wife decamp for Canada. The letters and journal entries here read as a kind of collage of the period: writers and addressees switch off, stories of sailing and camping sit alongside reflections on the horrors of war, the uselessness of the American opposition, newspaper clippings, photographs, and Alan’s own poems. “He could be humorous, pragmatic, philosophical, obtuse, and mystical all in one paragraph,” the editor writes of his brother, who died in 2011, and all those qualities are evident here. Editor Proctor has obviously put great patience and care into selecting these fragments, and the time was well-spent: readers are never lost, always engaged, and often charmed by the liveliness of Bruce’s prose (and of Alan’s verse scattered throughout the text). “It is not unusual for a Swede not to speak if he has nothing to say and perhaps it is this quality which gives the impression of depth,” Bruce writes at one point. Neither brother holds his tongue in this collection, and readers are richer for it.
An inviting exchange of stories and ideas across two continents and half a tumultuous decade.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63-391195-6
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Westphalia Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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