An unusual but consistently poignant memoir on grief and acceptance.
A grieving mother discovers a miraculous connection with her late son.
Roud begins her debut memoir with the fateful evening when her 19-year-old son Carter was killed in a car crash. “My son, whose presence lit up a room, now lay lifeless as we left him and walked out into the blackness,” she writes in the stunning pages that describe the accident. Journal entries for the next year relate her struggle and the strange occurrences that began to happen after Carter’s sudden death: His smell would arrive suddenly in the family cottage, a physical sensation of comfort would envelop Roud, and, most curiously, Carter’s friends would say that they had received text messages, as if he were still trying to communicate with them. Trying to make sense of it all, Roud delved into meditation and reiki and sought out a medium in the belief that her son was still with her and could be reached. After months of concentration exercises and self-doubt, Roud had a breakthrough: Early one morning, she let Carter’s spirit guide the pen in her hand to scribble “I love you” on a piece of paper. Soon, this kind of otherworldly experience would become a part of Roud’s daily routine as she let Carter guide her hand toward messages of love, peace, and the afterlife that she now hopes to share with the world. Roud’s first efforts toward an otherworldly connection fit perfectly into the all-consuming anguish that she expertly conveys; when she begs Carter’s friends to show her the text messages they say her son sent, it is a heartbreaking and very human portrait of grief. The book’s second half, largely composed of writing that Roud attributes directly to Carter, will be more difficult for skeptical readers to connect with. Long discussions between Roud, Carter, and Roud’s late father about God, death, and the power of spirits venture wholeheartedly and unapologetically into the supernatural; a little more skepticism would make it easier for readers to relate to these conversations. But, the emotion that Roud conveys about both losing and rediscovering her son remains entirely believable.
An unusual but consistently poignant memoir on grief and acceptance.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5213-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2020
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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