A book that fails in its ambition but still offers some provocative nuggets.
A clinical professor of liberal studies at NYU offers close readings of several books plus a discussion of the impact of the Harry Potter series on young readers worldwide.
A more accurate title for this book, part of the publisher’s Literary Agenda series, would have been The Necessity of Speculative Fiction, as Williams confines her exploration to such works, a substantial portion of which are not what many professionals in the field would call YA literature. Drawing heavily on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, she proffers exegeses of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents; G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen; Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts; Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium; Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring; and Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, and Akata Woman. Of these titles, only Farmer’s and Okorafor’s were published for a YA audience, though all feature young protagonists. As an argument for the importance of an audience-defined literature, the book is feeble. Nevertheless, Williams’ readings, though at times plodding, are generally not uninteresting. She finds in these texts endorsements of Appiah’s “challenge” to embrace difference as well as repeated themes of the importance of reading broadly and well and of the danger of climate change. The book comes alive in the fourth chapter, entitled “Reading Harry Potter in Abu Dhabi.” It is in conversations with students at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, with representation from all over the world, that Williams sees Appiah’s cosmopolitanism in action. These students, many having read the Harry Potter books in translation and often in secret, explore an experience that is “simultaneously local and global” and tussle movingly with J.K. Rowling’s tarnished legacy due to anti-trans comments. Williams doesn’t prove her thesis, but this chapter is where she gets closest to it.
A book that fails in its ambition but still offers some provocative nuggets.Pub Date: June 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780192848970
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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