Diarylike reminiscences of a lost love that range from mundane to moving.
In her emotional debut memoir, Yeasting tells the painful story of losing her fiance to cancer.
Why would a lively, attractive woman begin dating a terminally ill man she didn’t know? According to Yeasting, Michael Chu was easy to love. After meeting on a dating website, the two fun-loving Canadians instantly clicked. Michael was open about his terminal lung cancer, and Yeasting decided to accept a future broken heart and get to know him. The couple quickly became “soul mates” and spent more than a year together, living life to the fullest. They had a lot in common, including a love for travel, and visited beautiful places together, like Hawaii and the Dominican Republic. Yeasting’s love remained steadfast as Michael’s health faded, and when an additional tumor was discovered in his brain, she was there for him throughout the successful surgery. A two-time divorcée, Yeasting had been hesitant to remarry in the past, but when Michael proposed, she eagerly said yes. Unfortunately, he died in hospice care before they could marry. Much of their relationship is told via sugary love emails reprinted here (the book unfortunately repeats email addresses, etc., for all digital communication). In fact, along with email headers, the memoir could cut many unnecessary details, including dinner plans. However, Yeasting’s voice is honest and likable. She unblinkingly reveals the good (she was there for Michael when he could no longer walk) and the bad (she stormed out after an argument) aspects of her strong personality. Writes Yeasting, “I am old-fashioned but with a twist and a dash of spice.” Though the subject is somber, the black-and-white photos serve to lighten the tone. The book spans several years after Michael died, and the author plumbs her grieving process. Written as a form of self-therapy, Yeasting’s bittersweet account may comfort others who are grieving.
Diarylike reminiscences of a lost love that range from mundane to moving.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6747-9
Page Count: 306
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2016
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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