An emotional, edifying remembrance written with power and clarity.
A debut memoir recalls a juror’s momentous decision and his struggle with religious faith.
In 2009, Dubler was summoned to jury duty in Colorado’s Arapahoe County, and his 10-week service in a double-murder trial changed his life. The charges in the case were grim—a drug dealer was accused of a coldblooded shooting—and the stakes were dauntingly high; if the defendant was found guilty, he could face the death penalty. The author was emotionally overwhelmed by the gravity of his role, torn by a dilemma that he poignantly recounts: “I could choose mercy and offend everyone who clamored for the full extent of justice. Or I could choose the death penalty and offend everyone who said that there had already been enough tears, suffering, and death.” Dubler situates the trial within his own painful crisis of faith. Raised as an evangelical Christian, he was taught that the line between sin and righteousness was inflexible; he also says that he was generally seen by others as a man who was filled with divine spirit. However, despite his commitment to his faith, he felt disappointed in God as he languished in a dysfunctional marriage. While reconciling himself with the enormity of his judgment as a juror, Dubler felt compelled to confront his inclinations toward moral judgment. In this book, he sensitively portrays his duties as a juror, filling these moments with nuance, introspection, and self-doubt. Despite the monstrousness of the crime, Dubler recounts how he resisted thinking of the defendant as the personification of evil, as he detected “glimpses of his humanity.” Throughout, the author’s personal recollections are remarkably forthcoming and unguarded; he even discusses how sexual abstinence before marriage affected his relationship with his wife and how uncomfortable he was about sex’s “mechanics and messiness.” Still, the highlight of the book is his running comparison between his uneventful upbringing and the defendant’s traumatic one and the ways in which both virtue and chance indelibly shape a life.
An emotional, edifying remembrance written with power and clarity.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73252-920-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Golden Elm Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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