An effective and affecting evocation of a Kafkaesque period in US history, which caused more lasting harm than the better-remembered but shorter-lived McCarthy era. Responding to sociopolitical imperatives, President Truman signed Executive Order 9835 in March 1947. Among other things, it provided for the establishment of boards to pass on the loyalty of government employees. Journalist Bernstein's parents were caught up in the resultant witch hunts. As an official of a public workers' union, his father (an admitted leftist and sometime member of the Communist Party) defended individuals cited as traitors (by anonymous accusers) in quasi-judicial proceedings. Eventually branded a subversive, he was hounded from the labor movement and became "a reluctant capitalist," i.e., the proprietor of a neighborhood laundry in Washington, D.C. The author's mother, who had been active in progressive causes, was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954. All told, Executive Order 9835 drove at least 8,000 rank-and-filers from government in the seven years through 1954. Though disused from that point on, it was not rescinded until 1974 in the wake of Watergate, which, of course, enabled Bernstein to make a name for himself as an investigative reporter. Born in 1944, three months before his father went overseas with the WW II Army Air Force, the author (with almost as much exasperation as fondness) recalls childhood in a household whose ultraliberal adults were likely to take him on lunch-counter sit-ins or marches to protest the executions of the Rosenbergs. He also explores his latter-day relations with his parents, who (though shunned by many erstwhile friends) picked up the pieces and got on with their lives—dad as a fund-raiser for the National Conference of Christians & Jews, and mom as a saleswoman at a carriage-trade department store. Both parents discouraged Bernstein's inquiries (which consumed well over a decade) on grounds that a book would open old wounds and serve no particularly useful purpose. But Bernstein persevered nonetheless. While self-indulgent and disjointed in certain respects, the result of his devotion presents a moving and human record of activists who (though casualties of an American Inquisition) showed considerable grace under intolerable pressure.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1989
ISBN: 671-64942-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989
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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