An accomplished story of life overseas by a woman of the world.
An American woman tells the story of living, loving, working, and raising children in Africa for more than 20 years in this memoir.
Onyemelukwe (Love on the Road 2013, 2013) writes about the spell that the country of Nigeria cast on her, and of the joys and travails of her life among its people, in a book that features “sights, sounds, and smells unlike any I would ever see in the United States.” As an early Peace Corps volunteer, she arrived in Lagos in 1962. She was 21 years old, a teacher of German, and possessed a voracious appetite for experience. Nigeria, meanwhile, had only declared its independence from Britain two years before. In short order, the author met the man she would marry; later, she bore him the first of three children (much to the delight of those in his home village of Nanka) and grew increasingly comfortable among the country’s upper crust. She hired a household staff and settled down in a land where “Banana trees had leaves as big as umbrellas.” Within a few years, she and her Igbo husband moved to Eastern Nigeria to escape the country’s chaos of hysteria against the Igbo people. But the eastern part of the country was also undergoing change: it briefly rebelled to become the Republic of Biafra. The resulting conflict felt like “a pretend war” to the author—at least before hostile planes filled the sky and bombs fell near her temporary home. In the midst of this chaos, Onyemelukwe confronted the challenge of raising her children in multiple societies. The author is an experienced speaker on topics related to Nigerian culture, and so she proves a dab hand at it here, providing just enough detail to answer readers’ questions but not so much that they feel overwhelmed. Her prose is sturdy and workmanlike, and the pace of her book is stately—never rushing forward during scenes of crisis nor lollygagging when little is afoot. Overall, she’s an excellent steward of her past emotions, and readers will wish they were there at the Kakadu nightclub in Lagos, where she “danced with abandon to the sensual music,” or at a traditional Mmos masquerade, where she trembled at the spectacle.
An accomplished story of life overseas by a woman of the world.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935925-47-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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