A collection of stories, lists, sayings and brief meditations aimed at dozens of aspects of life.
Hoban’s frequently thought-provoking debut contains snippet-length segments and scenarios interspersed with maximlike mottos, themed lists and occasional pieces of poetry. The long, generously full collection of odds and ends is designed to challenge assumptions and undercut rote thinking. Hoban recounts many stories from his years as a prison employee and includes accounts of the things inmates typically say and think. But the range of his vignettes extends a good deal beyond: He can be topically political, as when he hopes that former U.S. President George Bush (most likely W) will never publish his memoirs and thinks that if he does, he should write them without the aid of ghostwriters—“I suspect his incoherence would reveal itself,” Hoban writes. More frequently, he can also be congenially philosophical, probing the nature of human thought and often summarizing things quite pithily: “Awareness is extinguished when it is used in service of self-abasement,” he writes in a segment titled “Duality.” There are brief bits on evolution, the complexities of communication styles and the persistence of “demons” in the human world. “Alcohol abuse, in contemporary society, is one example of belief in possession,” he says, which flows from his earlier claim that “Ninety-nine percent of getting help is asking for it.” Themes are expounded upon then seemingly disappear and crop back up with studied regularity; the coherence to these bagatelles is belied by their randomness. The book sometimes falls into the trap of too-easy aphorisms—lines like “there is no evil, only error,” for example, may sound fortune-cookie profound, though there’s not much to chew on. Yet far more often, the muscular compression of Hoban’s thinking is rewarding rather than frustrating, as when he draws on his employment history for metaphors: “Epoch to epoch, we continue to be in a prison where we fixate on bars of our own making while failing to see what lies beyond them.” The result is a book virtually guaranteed to have something to interest almost every reader.
An opinionated, ultimately optimistic series of reflections on the nature of humanity.
Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1611701746
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Robertson Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2014
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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