An informative, sometimes-tender memoir of midcentury small-town Americana.
Kellams (A Coach’s Life, 2007) shares fond recollections of a childhood spent in the small town of Marion, Iowa.
In a series of chapter-length vignettes, Kellams brings readers back to the 1940s and early ’50s, recalling a time when local papers and radios were the main sources of news, when young boys played cowboys and Indians with prized toy guns (cap guns, the author says, were the best) and when kids ran off to local swimming holes in the summertime. The elder of two sons born to Stanley and Margaret Kellams, the author came into the world in 1936, during the waning years of the Great Depression. His parents were educated and industrious, and they reflected a Midwestern frugality that was only enhanced by the economic turmoil of their times. By his own account, the author was a sensitive, insecure child, easily brought to tears, but he still depicts his childhood as a happy one. Many stories involve his love of and involvement in sports, including baseball, basketball, and swimming; his father is shown to be especially supportive of all these endeavors. In a disciplined narrative sprinkled with dry wit, Kellams relates his experiences factually rather than emotionally. The crisp prose usually maintains a reporter’s detachment (his parents, for instance, are frequently called Stanley and Margaret instead of Mom and Dad), but there are a few revelatory moments that will give readers a glimpse into the passions of the child. Here, for example, he speaks of working as a newspaper delivery boy for the Cedar Rapids Gazette when he was about 11 years old: “The smell of Fred Ross’s cigar…was the dominant odor, but it mixed with the bitter smell of wet ink, the woody scent of damp paper, and the mingled stench that rose from the jumble of our two dozen bodies….It was part of the romance of journalism.” Kellams not only delivered the Gazette, he read it every day, foreshadowing his eventual move east to obtain a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He would never again live in Iowa, but in this book, he offers effective reminders of the time he spent there.
An informative, sometimes-tender memoir of midcentury small-town Americana.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72976-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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