A passionate, poetic view of Romania in the days immediately after the fall of the Ceausescus by poet, essayist, and NPR commentator Codrescu (The Disappearance of the Outside, 1990, etc.), who returned to his homeland after living in exile for 25 years. Brought to Bucharest on assignment for NPR and ABC, Codrescu chronicles his journey and the events precipitating it, as well as his first jubilant reactions while standing in bloodstained, ice- covered University Square on New Year's Day 1990. Sobered by subsequent experiences on the streets and in the corridors of power, he records encounters with people from all walks of life living their first winter of freedom in 45 years in a city ravaged by recent fighting and decades of inadequate food and supplies. A journey to his birthplace in Transylvania summons a surge of memories, enhanced when he renews contact with high-school friends, and he vows to return for their reunion in the summer. When he does, in the wake of a renewed struggle against the National Salvation Front with its Communist leadership, and a dubious national election, he finds that the heady spirit of a few months before has already vanished, replaced by a reactionary mood and assertions that the revolution had been betrayed from the start. A final blow occurs at the reunion, as he sees that his school buddies profited immensely under tyranny, and the aftermath has fostered in them a vigorous nationalism and racism not seen publicly since the Nazi days. Intensely personal and keenly perceptive: a poignant study of a troubled homecoming, and a lively resource for anyone who would understand Romania today.
Pub Date: June 19, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-08805-8
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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