A compelling story about the author’s biological and adoptive families and how they shaped his sense of self.
An adoptee’s memoir of finding his own place in the world.
In this debut, Steffen traces his personal history, revealing layer upon layer of hidden truths as he unravels the stories he’s grown up with. He dates the events in his life from “the disappearance,” when his mother abandoned her three children and left rural Iowa. This event, coupled with his father’s unwillingness to care for his children, was a defining moment in the author’s life, as it led to the Steffen family adopting him and his sister. His stories of growing up with his adoptive parents, who belonged to a strict religious movement and weren’t inclined to show affection, fill this book, as do tales of his own teenage rebellion and gradual maturity. By the time he reached adulthood, Steffen found himself driven by a need to sort out the mysteries of his birth family, and he tracked down surviving relatives and other near-strangers who supplied crucial details. It’s a complex, sometimes-tragic story, and along the way, he slowly builds relationships with half-siblings, aunts, and more distant relatives and discovers new information about his mother and father. Although the narrative moves slowly in the opening chapters, it finds a steady pace after Steffen begins his sleuthing. Readers learn the truth bit by bit, just as the author did, and his personal growth is just as important as the facts he uncovers. Steffen’s descriptions are sharply drawn, particularly of the rural communities he visited during his search: “A first run of American Graffiti or Rocky or Star Wars seemed entirely plausible,” he writes. He also offers insights into his own character (“I have the right to remain silent, but I don’t have the ability”) that will gain readers’ sympathies as he unveils his past and embraces his present.
A compelling story about the author’s biological and adoptive families and how they shaped his sense of self.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1570741357
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Greyden Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2015
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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