A tone of humility and a great concern for others mark this well-paced work about an individual’s most important...
A debut author delivers a detailed account of her mysterious illness.
As a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer sent to a small village in northern Zambia in 1994, Kephart wanted more than anything to help. She learned to speak Bemba, lived in the small hut of a native family, and helped to dig a communal latrine. Hailing from Southern California, she had never been exposed to poverty and disease at such a high level; the bell of the local church tolled almost daily for someone’s death. She had also not been exposed to malaria. Medevacked to Lusaka, the capital, she receives that ominous diagnosis. “I understood then that I would forever carry with me my own personalized African souvenir,” she writes. Finding her dreams dashed and enduring a bout of temporary deafness and blindness, she wished for death as the symptoms worsened into uncontrollable muscle spasms. “What a colossal understatement,” she says of the Peace Corps training booklet, A Few Minor Adjustments, from which she takes the title of her memoir. Everything in her life had changed. But this is only the beginning of a rich and complicated story, told on each page with clear dialogue and memorable anecdotes. Even after returning to the U.S., fatigue and intense pain nearly stop the normal patterns of a young life—work, relationships, hope for the future. She completes a master’s degree during this time, but a glimpse into her journal, excerpted occasionally in the book, reveals her suffering: “I feel trapped in a life, a mind, a vision of confusion and isolation. My heart is drenched with black.” Once an active athlete, she struggled with staying comfortable when standing. Fifteen years of specialists (she names them Dr. Agreeable, Dr. Arrogant, Dr. Blank-Stare, Dr. Cookie-Cutter, Dr. Curt, Dr. Zoologically Inclined, etc.) and different treatment plans follow. Long after her time in Africa, the final chapters chart a surprising new diagnosis. Ultimately, this memoir chronicling her persistence should inspire readers and engender sympathy.
A tone of humility and a great concern for others mark this well-paced work about an individual’s most important asset—health.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947127-00-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bazi Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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