A series of visits to nine different desert areas in the American West and Southwest, by the author of Night Life (1989), etc. Over an 18-month period, logging 25,000 miles, Kappel-Smith recorded her observations of life and death in the desert, and made line drawings of everything she saw, from animals to the cacti and dunes. Visiting the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, where she spent time with the present residents, and the ruins of the Anasazi (an unknown people) in Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, Kappel- Smith attempted to record what life was and is like in these areas, even establishing a new measure of speed along the way—``bpm,'' or bats por minuto, the rate at which 250,000 bats exit Carlsbad Caverns. She visited Devil's Mole in Nevada, a pool of water the depths of which no one has yet plumbed—although some have tried and disappeared. She spent the night in a near-ruined hotel in Silver City, Idaho, a historic mining town in the mountains: The hotel has no linen, so visitors have to use sleeping bags. She also hunted down prospectors and recorded their conversations. Kappel-Smith's descriptions are precise (``The rim of the sky is the dusty blue of bleached jeans''), but she seems more comfortable with the plants and animals than with the characters she meets. There's something of a distancing effect when it comes to people, but, otherwise: a very well-done wilderness diary.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-48298-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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