A cracking good read, something that all too few essay anthologies manage to be.
Inaugural edition of a new series proves that there’s always room for another delivery method for quality short nonfiction.
Series editor Early (English, African and African-American Studies/Washington Univ.; This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s, 2003, etc.) and guest editor Dickerson (The End of Blackness, 2004, etc.) have gathered a vibrant mix of voices that belies the volume’s anodyne label. Early states up front his ecumenical goal: collecting the best essays authored by African-Americans. Even at that, he leaves the door open for others to write on racial issues; many will be surprised to see Andrew Sullivan’s chest-swelling ode to Barack Obama concluding the volume. Whatever the criteria involved, the book is a solid piece of work gathered from a wide range of publications (the New Yorker, Vibe, the St. Petersburg Times, etc.), loosely collected into subject buckets like “Activism/Political Thought” and “Internationally Black.” Early’s contribution, “Dancing in the Dark,” is a smart take on race and the South in film that recasts To Kill a Mockingbird as possibly more insidious than even Birth of a Nation. Emily Raboteau’s “Searching for Zion,” a labyrinthine account of her odyssey to reconcile her blackness with the spiritual quest for Jerusalem, is a masterpiece, as is Bill Maxwell’s sad three-parter about his disillusioning stint as a professor at a historically black college. Between these long-form classics crowd a host of shorter, divergent viewpoints. The effect is something like a loud family dinner with plenty of opinionated relatives who don’t always get along. Right-wing scold John McWhorter pops by to complain about the lack of American identity in modern youth, and Chloé Hilliard talks brashly about young black lesbians in Brooklyn acting just as gangsta as the boys. Meanwhile, off to the sides where it’s quieter, Obama writes of reincorporating faith into the progressive dialogue, and Malcolm Gladwell offers fresh insights into what I.Q. testing actually measures. There are a few weak selections (Michael Eric Dyson, we’re looking in your direction); fortunately, they are on the shorter side.
A cracking good read, something that all too few essay anthologies manage to be.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80691-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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