An endearing snapshot of a wartime marriage unlikely to appeal to a wide readership.
A daughter lovingly reconstructs her parents’ lives based on the letters they exchanged while separated during World War II.
Irma and Louis Vajda had similar childhood experiences growing up in an insular enclave of Eastern European families in Cleveland. Both Hungarian—Irma was born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, and Louis arrived from Hungary in 1921 at the age of 7—they faced discrimination whenever they ventured beyond their neighborhoods. They met in 1938 at a dance and married two years later during a tumultuous time in American history, haunted by both the Depression and the specter of world war. Louis was drafted into the Navy in 1943 as an apprentice seaman and served aboard the USS Bull, an assignment that often proved terribly dangerous. Between 1943 and 1945, Louis and Irma exchanged more than 500 letters, the correspondence a remarkably touching “lifeline between husband and wife.” Budden (The Un-Common Raven: One Smart Bird, 2013, etc.)—the daughter of Louis and Irma—weaves a short history of her parents’ marriage based on those letters, some reproduced in the book. Those two years of separation caused great anxiety for both, and the tender epistles provided much-needed reassurance, especially for Irma, who writes: “I want so to hear from you. Please don’t give me any excuses. That isn’t what I want! Don’t say there isn’t anything to write about. There is too! Even if you just say things like ‘I got up from my chair and then sat down again.’ ” The author skillfully gives a peek at her parents’ lives and at those of immigrants in the U.S. during a period of unrest and scarcity. A thoughtful account of the ways in which the war transformed the place of women in society—essentially compelled to join the workforce in the absence of their husbands—emerges as well. The letters often dwell on quotidian matters like bills, and the story as a whole is very personal, accompanied by family photographs. As a result, Budden’s book will likely be most appreciated by those in her sphere of family and friends.
An endearing snapshot of a wartime marriage unlikely to appeal to a wide readership.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-55760-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Red Rock Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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