A painful, poignant, and ultimately triumphant story that will have special meaning for adoptees.
A debut memoir from a woman who was adopted at birth that explores the issues of identity and family.
Stice was adopted by Kenneth and Mona Venda Kirchner in Detroit in 1943, and she was 4 years old when she was told that she wasn’t their biological daughter. The information was barely comprehensible to her as a child, but it planted a question in her mind that she would spend most of her life trying to solve: “Who am I?” When she was 5, she told her cousin Mona that she was adopted, and Mona replied: “It means your mama isn’t your real mama.” It was the first of several comments that made Stice feel she wasn’t an equal member of the family that she thought of as her own. Although she was an only child, her parents both came from large families, including brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, and many cousins, and so she felt connected to a wide, extended clan—until she didn’t. The most hurtful comment came from her father; a normal battle between parent and teenager turned especially nasty when the 14-year-old Stice was invited to a dance and her father refused to give her permission to go: “ ‘We have to be so careful with you,’ he says, ‘because we don’t know if you are going to turn out to be bad like your mother. Bad blood. It happens.’ ” In 2003, a few years after the death of her parents, Stice finally embarked on an earnest, and eventually successful, search for her biological family. For financial reasons, the Kirchner family moved around frequently, and as a result, this narrative is enhanced by a great variety of backdrops, including Michigan, Kentucky, and Kansas; Stice and her beloved grandmother spent many summers visiting family members. Comparisons of city and suburban life versus farm life, as well as Northern versus Southern culture, form a portrait of mid-20th-century America. The young Stice emerges as a feisty child with a keen sense of justice. For instance, she was outraged when the family went to a segregated beach on Lake St. Claire, Michigan, and she mused: “A vague, uneasy feeling has come over me. I can’t name it, but it means, I don’t like being a Gentile if that’s the way we treat other people.” For the author, it was one more confirmation that she was somehow different. She reveals that at one family reunion, one of her cousins, Gerald, whispered to her: “Why do you like all those family stories so much? It’s not even your family.” This adoption story has an intriguing extra wrinkle, as her parents had actually met Stice’s birth mother but didn’t share that information due to a fear of divided loyalties. Many vignettes in this eloquent narrative could be those of any rebellious child growing up in midcentury America, but the author also layers her memoir with an ever present fear of rejection.
A painful, poignant, and ultimately triumphant story that will have special meaning for adoptees.Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-84976-7
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
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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