A gentle and quiet real-life adventure.
In Walker’s first book, readers are invited to join him on an autobiographical travelogue as he takes a meandering course across the heart of Canada.
Departing from Nova Scotia on the east coast, Walker drove his SUV as far north as the Yukon and as far west as British Columbia. A breezy, genial writer with an agreeable curiosity, he recalls the journey in a pleasant, conversational tone. The adventure also had a more somber side, though, as Walker—a retired attorney from Ontario and a longtime fighter for human rights—came to terms with the death of his spouse of many years. He spent the summer of 2012 healing and growing, taking a leisurely interest in the world around him: the wildlife, farmers rushing to bring their crops in before the rain, making new friends, and visiting long-absent family members. His journal entries take readers with him in the present tense, each moment unfolding as it did for him. He offers quiet encouragement to would-be travelers as well as a few handy tips on how they can head out on the road, too. With evenhanded opinions, he offers a verbal map of worthwhile sites for each place he visited, places readers will most likely wish to experience themselves, either on a long drive-about or in a day trip. The text is clean, if a bit undistinguished, and the descriptions of places, people, and events are clear and easy to understand. Most importantly, Walker’s long experience as a storefront attorney has made him comfortable around all sorts of people, and his openness to new interactions is infectious. Some travel books are about explorers dogged by disaster; this one is about an explorer of humanity. His inward journey toward accepting loss and things past is subtle and easily missed if the reader is in a hurried mood. Like Walker’s trip across Canada, the text should be enjoyed slowly.
A gentle and quiet real-life adventure.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6683-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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