Raconteur Buchwald (Leaving Home, 1993, etc.) checks in with the second installment of his memoirs. It's full of lively anecdotes, and dropped names are as plentiful as autumn leaves in the Bois de Boulogne. Picking up the narrative where Leaving Home left off, Buchwald blithely relates what happened after he landed, in 1948, what may have been the world's greatest postwar job: writing for the Herald Tribune in Paris. As an entertainment columnist and food critic for the paper, Buchwald got to know, close up, corporate bigwigs, politicians, showbiz luminaries, and other assorted stars of the International Set. While he was earning $25 a week, young Art hobnobbed with the likes of Truman Capote and Elvis Presley, Thornton Wilder and J. Paul Getty. He did a one-night stand as a waiter at Maxim's. He crashed fancy dress balls. He helped further Prince Rainier's courtship of Grace Kelly, and he mediated (with hilarious results) a dispute between the Greek magnates Onassis and Niarchos. He challenged Rex Harrison (who had taken umbrage at one of his columns) to a duel. (Harrison didn't show.) By dint of sincere application and a droll gift for puncturing pomposity wherever he found it, he rose to the position of bon vivant wonderfully. Even better, he found and married the redoubtable Ann, and they in turn adopted three children. Ultimately, though, the high life took its toll; there was a struggle with depression and a period of separation from Ann. On the whole, however, the memoir is about the fun and romance of a now vanished time. ``All of my writing since,'' Buchwald notes, ``has been the result of my landing that job on the Trib.'' While this current installment is not as Dickensian as the widely praised Leaving Home, Buchwald's self-deprecating wit is in full display. Some stories are unabashedly sentimental; all are entertaining. Paris never looked better. (First printing of 100,000; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14187-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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