A brisk, unadorned personal account of a trying time in one woman’s life.
A memoir of one woman’s battle with cancer and her reliance on faith from debut author Kreinhop, with occasional commentary by author Calvert (How I Quit Smoking and Lived to Tell About It, 2014).
After having a tumor discovered in her chest, the author first experienced shock—“I was numb all over”—followed by tears, prayer and, eventually, a kind of spiritual acceptance. (“God had a plan. If I were part of that plan for the future, I would be in it. If not, I wouldn’t. So be it!”) And so begins a personal journey through a daunting world of doctors, tests and chemotherapy. Aided by friends, volunteers and an unrelenting belief in a higher power, the author endures the often painful and embarrassing world of a cancer diagnosis and treatment. From the struggles of getting to treatment sessions through difficult Indiana weather to the debilitating nausea of chemotherapy, the fight against cancer is never an easy one, even with the author’s tenacious pluck. Admitting at times to nervousness, self-pity and frustration (even with those who are attempting to help, such as someone who has volunteered to drive the author to the hospital even if they apparently are not very skilled at driving), Kreinhop presents her journey in an immensely believable fashion and puts a human face on the world-shattering position of such a grave diagnosis. Relatable for any reader who has been through such a journey (or may be facing one), the story maintains a steady pace, pausing only to mention—though never to linger—on moments of fear and trepidation. Abutted with personal details that help to illuminate the individuals involved (such as the author’s joy at receiving an exercise bike one Christmas), the overall feel is one of a no-nonsense family story that, though lacking in robust flourishes, maintains its verisimilitude. Short on embellishments, the story amounts to one woman’s honest telling of a very real and common occurrence.
A brisk, unadorned personal account of a trying time in one woman’s life.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493760220
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2014
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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