An intriguing, sometimes-thrilling account of remote Alaskan life in 1979.
A writer recounts a particularly difficult year for her parents homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in this memoir.
For Cutting’s (Where the Moose Slept, 2017, etc.) free-spirited parents, Tim and Kate Peters, their rugged life on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula was worth it for the beauty that surrounded them. Sure, they might have to travel hours for every amenity and labor for every comfort, but it allowed them to raise their infant daughter (the author) on a mountain with panoramic views, amid fields of wildflowers and alder forests where moose slept. This second volume of Cutting’s ongoing account of her family’s time in Alaska depicts one year when the remoteness of their home put particular pressures on the Peters household. The summer of 1979 was tricky enough. The author relates the time her mother was surprised to come home to find a man standing in their kitchen wielding a large hunting knife and describes a brush fire that nearly engulfed the property. While this was all going on, Cutting’s parents were racing to insulate and furnish their newly built house for the approaching cold. With their only neighbors away for the winter, the couple was forced to deal with mounting snow, impassable roads, cabin fever, and unexpected illness—trials that put their love of Alaska to the ultimate test. Cutting writes in a simple, understated prose that communicates the dire straits of her family while also downplaying its fears: “Kate watched as the raking whiteness howled past. She and her infant companion huddled together, listening apathetically to the perverse winds.” The author, who was a baby at the time, has fashioned the narrative from her parents’ recollections and her mother’s letters, many of which are included in the text. The sequel, which features family photographs, does not attempt to play up the drama, nor does it really investigate either Tim or Kate as complex characters. Rather, its goal is to present the day-to-day demands of living in a harsh climate far from the niceties of civilization. For those interested in feats of hard work and ingenuity at the edge of the world, the book delivers nicely.
An intriguing, sometimes-thrilling account of remote Alaskan life in 1979.Pub Date: April 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9995061-9-6
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Echo Hill Arts Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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