An astute investigation into repeated patterns of abuse and victimhood.
In her debut memoir, Lee painstakingly re-creates her experiences of domestic violence and charts her journey toward self-assurance.
In one of the author’s earliest memories, she recalls her nonreligious father bringing a gun to a Tuesday night Jehovah’s Witness church service and waving it around, as she and her religious mother sat in a pew. She says that her mother talked him down, as she so often did during his verbal and physical abuse, but it foreshadowed events to come. After spending time in a mental hospital, she says, her father shot an older man dead in a car near their home—an event that Lee witnessed. Although he coached her to say that she’d seen nothing, he was eventually arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Later, she says, her high school boyfriend pressured her into sex and then marriage. She temporarily left college to run his grocery store, but when his bullying turned physical and he broke her ribs, she left him. Divorced at 23, she stumbled into an abusive relationship with a man who broke her jaw during a drunken blackout, she says; even so, she stayed with him for six years. Lee’s vivid recall of decades-past events is impressive. Along the way, she effectively interjects psychological insights that she’s gained about various people’s motives. Only with hindsight, for example, has she understood that she repeated her mother’s behavior and internalized blame for bad situations in her life: “My self-worth was nearly nonexistent,” she notes. Her use of the present tense for accounts of her memories allows readers to be there in the moment, experiencing her fear and feeling compassion for her. Later, she insists that the cycle of violence only ends when one admits it: “to stop seeing yourself as a victim of abuse, you must stop denying that the abuse occurred.” A late section, regarding a feud with a neighbor and her own decision to drop the legal battle against the man who broke her jaw, is overlong, but it emphasizes the value of abandoning one’s desire for revenge.
An astute investigation into repeated patterns of abuse and victimhood.Pub Date: June 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88445-4
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Bond Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 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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