Powerful and intimate self-portraits from writers who have much to teach readers.
Essays from 11 authors describe their personal experiences—frustrations, hurts, and triumphs— in confronting the challenges of disabilities.
At age 26, Cipriani (Blind, 2011, etc.) was beaten by childhood friends; the assault left him blind. His search for articles and literature about people living with disabilities led him to a career in journalism. Eventually, he asked other disabled writers to share their stories. This collection is culled from the numerous responses he received, and they reflect a broad spectrum of debilitating conditions: early-onset severe rheumatoid arthritis, deafness, loss of sight, cerebral palsy, high-functioning autism, and injuries inflicted by a vehicle. The chapter-length autobiographies are as different in experience as they are in voice. Whether they became disabled as young or middle-aged adults—or knew they were somehow different from childhood—all of these writers experienced what Cipriani calls their own “rites of passage,” the process of learning to navigate through personal relationships and an unfriendly environment. And for those stricken in adulthood, there is also a period of denial to overcome—a reckoning with the monumental and permanent change in their circumstances. The stories from several writers with autism are especially revelatory. Sam E. Rubin, in “Overdubbing the Cody Effect,” who was diagnosed early, vividly describes his childhood terror facing discipline meted out by a special ed teacher. To this day, Rubin suffers from recurrent PTSD. On the other hand, Kimberly Gerry-Tucker, in “Firsts in Art,” wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood. She firmly believes that she would have benefitted from the extra attention found in special ed. She also poignantly educates readers on the inner workings of the autistic experience. After a difficult but very successful presentation to a large audience, she discovered that the organizer wanted to hug her. “I don’t grant that sort of thing to just anyone,” she explains, “because hugs feel like indents afterward, which can’t be popped back out for hours at times. But we hugged, or I sort of patted her, which is my hug.”
Powerful and intimate self-portraits from writers who have much to teach readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73231-270-8
Page Count: 226
Publisher: OLEB Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 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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