A charming portrait of a German family caught up in the sweep of history.
Debut editor Claire Ohlsson Geheb collects the correspondence of her German father-in-law and his relatives in this debut biography.
In 1900, Willy Geheb was the fourth child born to a blacksmith and his wife in what is now the state of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. He grew up there, served in the German military during World War I, and saw the early years of the Weimar Republic. He immigrated to Brazil in 1923, then lived in Mexico before finally settling in Chicago and raising a family of his own. He continued to write letters home to his German relatives, receiving news of the republic’s economic troubles, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the horror of World War II and its aftermath. After he suffered a stroke in 1980, a chest of the German-language letters as well as his personal diaries was discovered by his son, John. He and his wife, the credited editor here, finally secured the services of a translator in 2013, and they published the material in English to offer readers a unique view of 20th-century German history as seen from the perspective of a single family: “The Geheb family personalities, beliefs, relationships, daily activities, employment, and life styles described in the letters bring the history and living conditions of the times to life,” says editor Geheb in an introduction. Indeed, the letters of the Geheb family members, and of Willy in particular, are filled with moments of warmth, humor, and charming specificity, as when Willy describes quitting a job as a chef because he was getting “fat.” Willy is also capable of disarming profundity when commenting on current events: “Dear Father,” he writes in March 1927, “it is certainly to your credit to take the fate of Germany to heart, but look at the history of the world, and ask yourself, where are the mighty kingdoms now?” His accounts of the final days of both world wars are particularly compelling.
A charming portrait of a German family caught up in the sweep of history.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990903-4-3
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Schmirma Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
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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