An intense victimization saga.
A Trinidad-born woman, now a U.S.–based nurse, describes her traumatic childhood and tumultuous adult experiences in this debut memoir.
At age 3, Bella was left with her father, a Trinidad-based funeral home operator, when her mother fled to the U.S. with Bella’s sister. After a frantic period of “international kidnapping,” Bella and her sister spent the bulk of their childhood back in Trinidad with their father and his girlfriend/eventual wife, whom Bella dubbed “El Diabla Puta” (“The Devil Whore”). While Bella endured ongoing abuse from this pair (beatings, lack of food, etc.), her father’s half brother sexually molested her. Although Bella and her sister returned to their mother as teenagers, the damage was done. Bella got pregnant, married young, and spent her adult life “running and running as fast as I could from all my doubts, fears, and my past filled with a multitude of poor choices right at my heels.” While she eventually earned a nursing degree that allowed her to support herself (and flee stalking and deadbeat lovers), she also made “a career out of being pregnant just when I was ready to bail out of a bad relationship” and bore four children, all with different, problematic fathers. But by memoir’s end, Bella “can see the strength that I possess. I don’t know what’s in God’s divine plan for me, but I will continue to be the best I can be while enjoying life to the fullest without any more regrets.” The author has penned an initially gripping, then ultimately unrelenting tale of endless turmoil. While she makes note of “how much I have grown,” there is more focus, indeed overload, in this narrative on her destructive patterns repeating themselves, with one of her final chapters, for example, detailing her return to a cheating lover. She is also surprisingly detached about the travails and imprisonment of her daughter, noting, “She and I had this odd disconnect from the very beginning.” Still, this is certainly a striking snapshot of the vicious, damaging cycles that can arise from childhood trauma.
An intense victimization saga.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-8266-3
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 16, 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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