A candid 9/11 account that deftly focuses on those who are still grappling with the tragedy’s challenges.
A collection of writings from a 9/11 survivor recalls not only the horror of that day, but also the trauma that followed months and even years after.
In this compilation of new material, blogs for the HuffPost, and Van Why’s (That Day in September, 2006) previous memoir, the author speaks not just about what he witnessed on 9/11, but the strife felt by him and others who lived through it as well. Working on Church Street, a mere stone’s throw from the World Trade Center, Van Why offers a firsthand account of both plane crashes, the strength of the urge to flee, and the desire to help those who fell in the street even before the buildings collapsed. Sharing these experiences with loved ones in emails, the author was encouraged by friends and family to continue to write about the event. At first, he penned a play, then adapted it, and he continued to produce prose. This collection examines a myriad of subjects relating to the tragedy along with Van Why’s own struggles with PTSD, as each anniversary, the death of Osama bin Laden, and visits to the 9/11 memorial stirred up feelings that were far from buried. Other survivors’ stories are shared as well as physical ailments caused by the toxins released that day. Van Why’s writings are intimate, particularly in capturing the drama of 9/11, recounting a surreal picture of streets littered with snowlike falling paper and the smell of the air, which the author realized was made up of not just burning jet fuel or building materials, but also “among those particles going down into my lungs were those of burnt human remains.” It is a shocking but necessary honesty, illustrating what so many survivors will carry the rest of their lives. Van Why’s play, which would become the basis for his first memoir, is discussed at some length. While writing about writing can become tedious, the insights revealed when audiences approached to divulge their own experiences—“Everyone has a story of 9/11”—make for a strong payoff.
A candid 9/11 account that deftly focuses on those who are still grappling with the tragedy’s challenges.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8980-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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