An affecting portrayal of youthfulness stained by war.
A woman chronicles her childhood in Germany during and after World War II in this debut memoir.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the members of Yearman’s family knew their lives in Germany would be transformed. Two years later, their town, Kiel, would be regularly bombed by British warplanes. In 1941, the author’s father explained to her that he had no choice but to send her away temporarily—all children between the ages of 6 and 10 living near military targets were compelled to relocate to the countryside. Yearman was sent to Seidel, a small farming village 300 miles east, and she was taken in by Anna Arndt, a kind woman who lived with her parents. The author was 6, attending school for the first time, and was fortunate to avoid the fate of so many of the era’s displaced children, who were exploited for free labor. Yearman’s temporary arrangement became a long-term one, and she fled Seidel with her new family in 1945 to avoid invading Soviet troops, briefly settling in Swinemunde, a Russian-occupied territory that was relatively stable. It was dangerous for her custodians to amble about freely because of the hostile Soviet forces. So Yearman spent much of her time scavenging for their food (“In general, the Russian soldiers had the decency to leave children alone”). The family eventually returned to Seidel, but it was now technically a Polish territory under Soviet rule and became too perilous. Warned by a Russian soldier of German descent of an imminent raid, they fled yet again. In her engrossing book (written with debut author Hanisch), Yearman recalls that she would not return to her father until she was 11, with her mother now dead from diphtheria. The prose artfully combines an unflinchingly honest account of Yearman’s travails with beautifully poetic descriptions. After she watched a ferry that departed from Swinemunde explode from contact with a mine, she observed the wreckage: “A carcass of a cow. I understood that animals died. I knew that. Then I realized, with clarity, that the people on that ferry had died too, just like the shattered cow floating in the water.” Yearman’s remembrance, which features some family photographs, is poignant, filled with vivid details but unembellished by maudlin sentiment. She allows the genuine power of her autobiographical drama to speak for itself.
An affecting portrayal of youthfulness stained by war.Pub Date: June 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-89121-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Third Path Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 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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