A vivid, honest portrait of an imperfect but intrepid mid-20th-century American family.
Debut author Albert recalls her brief time in Nigeria as the only child of a father who was lured to British colonial Africa and a mother who reluctantly went along for the ride.
Like so many tales of misadventure, this one begins at the end; it’s a stock technique, but it works for this sentimental, thoughtful memoir. In March 1953, after spending the night in a Kano, Nigeria, jail, Albert’s father secured his release despite his debtor’s wishes—just in time to get himself, his wife, Josie, and their 10-year-old daughter (the author) on the first flight to London. Two years before, Albert’s father, disillusioned by his career in law, decided to uproot the family from their cozy existence in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, and become an exporter of lead ore. From the outset, Albert deftly illustrates her portrait of her father as a restless, self-serving man who was convinced that exporting ore from Nigeria would fulfill his greatest desire: to become a wealthy man. On the way to Africa, Albert’s parents casually dumped her off at an English boarding school, not unlike the one that George Orwell wrote about in his autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” Albert would hear little from her parents, and it wasn’t until five months later that they brought her to Nigeria. The author reconstructs the family’s remaining year and a half there, most of it spent in the city of Jos, using letters between her mother and aunt, and her father and uncle. Each one is rich with details of the family’s daily life in the city; Albert’s father’s calamitous trade and mining negotiations with European-weary village chiefs; and both parents’ emotional struggles with expatriate existence and ultimate financial failure. Yet Albert also infuses the narrative with a deep love and admiration for her parents, which results in deliciously complex portraits. The book could have done without a handful of vague references to “Africans” instead of “Nigerians,” but for the most part, Albert remains vigilant regarding the fraught social atmosphere of colonial Africa.
A vivid, honest portrait of an imperfect but intrepid mid-20th-century American family.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5006-9476-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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