This account features an important perspective on a volatile moment of American history, but fails to showcase some of its...
In this debut memoir, a writer narrates his last summer before being drafted and the staggering choice he soon faced.
During the summer of 1967, all that Glass and his best friend, Keith, cared about were plans to travel up the East Coast while surfing beaches from Miami to New York. The Vietnam War was nothing more than a topic to be avoided around parents and certain friends. After buying an antique hearse, the two became temporary local celebrities before eventually setting off in a VW that Keith stole in a momentary act of teenage rebellion. They made their way through parties, diners, and girls across the mid-Atlantic, before meeting the beautiful Barbara, who ended up becoming Glass’ girlfriend. Then he received news that due to slipping grades and skipped classed, he would be drafted. Suddenly without a future, Glass headed into basic training in South Carolina and then to a base on the West Coast, but with no surfing in the sun as he had often dreamed. At this point, more than halfway through the account, the memoir finally reveals itself to be the exciting recollections of a deserter. For months, he slipped in and out of the Army bureaucracy and jail as he struggled with the idea of abandoning the base for the counterculture of San Francisco before making a final, life-changing decision. Glass skillfully captures the tense mood among forced recruits, watching those who resisted get dragged away. He also explores abuse at the Presidio with great care, narrating a near uprising among soldiers. Unfortunately, the work’s first half weighs down this intriguing material. Details of beaches and cars and stiff dialogue take up far too much space. (Most exchanges do not advance plot or character development: “I can’t believe we are finally going!” “This car really has a lot more power than my old one.”) By the thrilling, but far too abrupt conclusion, it is clear that the book has left some great opportunities on the side of the road.
This account features an important perspective on a volatile moment of American history, but fails to showcase some of its best moments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2733-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
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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