Provocative and thought-provoking, this account definitely requires an open mind and is sure to inspire spirited debate from...
A man reflects on a pivotal personal choice that changed his life.
In his slender debut memoir, Connecticut attorney Robinson’s main focus is on his sexuality—his evolution from exhibiting gay tendencies as a teenager to marrying a woman. With an economy of words and consistent honesty, the author, now age 65, describes how his struggle to make sense of his physical attraction to boys became an obsession. He writes frankly about his gay yearnings in high school, which confused him yet spurred one person to instruct him that “sex should be between a male and female, not two males.” Still, his early adult life became a time of sexual fantasy and interest in both men and women. While Robinson’s life is indeed unique, his rationalizations concerning why a man with gay tendencies would want to romantically date a woman are confusing and frustratingly insular (bisexuality is not discussed). Among them is the theory that since the number of heterosexual marriages in Hawaii proliferated over same-sex unions from the end of 2016 through 2017, a natural conclusion can be drawn that a gay man would want to “go with the crowd” and wed a woman. For the author, this reasoning also applies to human anatomy, which he feels dictates that male and female sex organs are naturally “designed to fit” together in an attestation that is widely repeated throughout the plainspoken book. He firmly believes that men should “keep their options open” when considering which gender to physically engage with while disavowing gay sexuality as a genetic predisposition. Whether readers agree or not, he writes from the mindset that he should live his life according to what is traditionally and societally expected of him and “to do what I am anatomically designed to do,” including enjoying his marriage to his wife of 15 years. Most controversial, however, is Robinson’s disapproval of the abolishment of gay conversion therapy, which he equates to “banning weight-loss therapy,” as he believes it should be an option for confused youth to consider on their own. His book offers plenty of food for thought for both readers comfortable with their identities and those questioning them.
Provocative and thought-provoking, this account definitely requires an open mind and is sure to inspire spirited debate from both sides of the sexual orientation issue.Pub Date: July 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983345-65-4
Page Count: 60
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
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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