VOICES FROM THE RUST BELT

Name: VOICES FROM THE RUST BELT
Author: Anne Trubek
ISBN: 978-1-250-16297-7

edited by Anne Trubek ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018

Essays that are uneven in quality but unrelenting in their frank, even painful, descriptions and assessments of one of...

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An assortment of essays by writers who stand on various autobiographical elevations to view America’s Rust Belt.

Several writers—including editor Trubek (The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, 2016, etc.), the founder and director of Belt Publishing—discuss the origin of the term Rust Belt, tracing it to Walter Mondale in 1984. However, the concern of these essayists is not so much with the term itself as with the social, economic, and personal elements of the Belt. Trubek has assembled an impressively diverse array of voices, including men, women, gay, straight, black, white, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and others. Some are professional writers, journalists, historians, teachers, and editors; some are public officials; some are people who have grown up in such Rust Belt communities as Cleveland, Akron, Buffalo, Detroit, and Flint. Some voices are bitter, even angry. Black historian and urban planner Henry Louis Taylor Jr. discusses Buffalo’s “hipster, latte-drinking whites” and a “city being re-created for whites.” Other writers are bitter about the disproportionate poverty in cities, poor schools and public services, drug abuse and violence, heartless coal companies, and city governments that allow retailers to abandon buildings. But currents of hope also flow throughout. One writer tells about public gardens and community restoration, and another urges Rust Belt residents to move on—not by forgetting but by crafting new ideas of community and progress. Others try to understand the historical and cultural forces that have created the Belt. The essays vary widely in quality; a glance at the notes on the contributors helps explain why: not everyone here is a “professional” writer. Regardless, it seems almost churlish to complain about the quality of a voice that is telling you something significant, something you really ought to know—and need to understand.

Essays that are uneven in quality but unrelenting in their frank, even painful, descriptions and assessments of one of America’s most devastated lands.

Pub Date: April 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-16297-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.