A guide to embracing and understanding the later stages of life.
In her debut, Schoenholz coins a new term for an older woman whose children have left home and whose career is likely winding down. She calls her a Belledame, a term that invokes “the beautiful and the mature” and “[she] who moves into elderhood with grace and joy.” After some heavy reflection, the author, a Belledame herself, writes, “I should be moving from the ‘bucolic’ family life I had already experienced...toward the ‘city’ of the future.” Readers learn about her journey toward self-acceptance through journal entries, short poems and illustrations. The author certainly practices what she preaches, as she found a second career as an archaeologist after her children left home. The prospect of rediscovering herself clearly excites her, although she knows that she and other women have their work cut out for them: “I suspect that the better we have been at being the Mother, the harder it will be to become the Belledame. I am discovering…certain freedoms that I long ago suppressed, or repressed, in favor of focus on my family.” Her sentiments are likely to resonate with readers of a certain generation, as will her thoughts on the responsibilities of grandmothering, how to travel as an older person and what sorts of personal accomplishments are worth celebrating. There are a few weak spots, some of them technical: Most of the book is presented in a typeface that isn’t easy on the eyes, and the author quotes Wikipedia as a primary source. There’s also an underdeveloped section about quantum physics and a discussion of personal symbols that seems like it was more helpful for the writer’s own personal journey than it will be for her readers’. But Schoenholz is a likable, honest writer (“So, getting old is indeed a bitch”), and her goal of “[d]ancing down to death” may inspire others to make the most of their older years.
A kind, intimate manual to growing old that isn’t radical but is reassuring and sweet.
Pub Date: May 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497573260
Page Count: 114
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 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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