An engaging life story, as told through a whimsical collection of fatherly musings.
In this debut memoir, a father reminisces about notable people and places in his eventful life.
The dying art of letter writing isn’t lost on Roberts, a British-born attorney who practiced law in Canada. His charmingly unconventional memoir takes the form of 83 “letters” to his four children, but this description hardly does them justice. Each is an artfully composed essay that not only reveals much about the author himself, but also often contains a pearl of worldly wisdom. Roberts begins with a series of missives about growing up in bomb-scarred England during World War II. In “A Child’s History of the Battle of Britain,” he describes how his ears were always alert for incoming aircraft—both the “powerful, friendly, protective sound” of the British Spitfire and the “deadly drone” of German warplanes. Although the author loosely groups the letters by subject, he also playfully hops from decade to decade and continent to continent. He writes of sipping café au lait in Paris in the1950s, meeting a native Haidu on the Queen Charlotte Islands in the ’70s and watching birds in Hong Kong in the ’80s. Perhaps the most captivating letters describe the author’s clients when he was a defense attorney in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Eddie Silver,” for example, was a small-time hustler who figured out an ingenious way to scam coins from public pay phones; “Real Carrier” was a schizophrenic French Canadian who decapitated a man and might have killed Roberts, too, if some cautious jailers hadn’t prevented the lawyer from entering his cell. Overall, the book is a pleasure to read thanks to the author’s genial prose and lively wit. Roberts is a gifted storyteller with an appreciation for eccentric personalities and life’s ironies. The book’s disjointed format, however, makes it difficult to assemble a complete profile of the author, as basic autobiographical data are scattered throughout. Roberts explains, somewhat apologetically, that he’s cursed with a “magpie mind” that’s constantly roving and easily tempted to stray. This trait may have irritated his schoolteachers, but here it makes for a meandering but thoroughly delightful memoir.
An engaging life story, as told through a whimsical collection of fatherly musings.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460233399
Page Count: 312
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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