A sweet, gentle book that captures a man’s youth in all of its wonder.
A debut memoir that bursts with Southern flavor and charm.
Bonner recounts the lively antics of his rural Georgia childhood in the 1960s and ’70s in this pleasant book. In each chapter, he provides a brief slice of Southern life with all the trimmings; for example, in “The Importance of Biscuits,” he waxes nostalgic for this small but crucial food (“not just a side dish…a staple”) and recalls the care his mother took when preparing them. Three-year-old Bonner’s love for them was so strong, in fact, that he once bit into a doorknob, convinced that the white porcelain was actually a biscuit. He suffers another injury in “Keeping Me in Stitches,” which outlines an innocent family outing to the beach that ended with the author in the hospital. But this collection of memories is not all painful; as Bonner points out, “the simplest pleasures are surely the sweetest ones,” and he writes of the Christmas fun he and his siblings had with the boxes their presents came in and of the birth of his new baby cousin. Throughout, the author captures the slow, easy pace of Southern living, dwelling on the day-to-day activities of a young boy who’s encouraged to find adventure all around him. He also recalls less pleasant times, such as when his mother spanked him once at the grocery store for misbehaving, but these memories are always recounted in a context of love and trust. Overall, these brief anecdotes are candid, humorous and enjoyable. The author’s ability to see the bright side of any situation makes for a pleasant, undemanding read, and he recreates these stories of his siblings and extended family with loving detail, in straightforward, precise prose. Bonner shows a reverence for his youth that’s contagious; as he aptly puts it, he and his siblings “were poor kids living a rich life.”
A sweet, gentle book that captures a man’s youth in all of its wonder.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985795009
Page Count: 138
Publisher: C.D. BONNER
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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