A straightforwardly told chronicle that will appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy.
Novelist-playwright Arsenault (The Company Way, 2012, etc.), drawing on his own family’s background, describes an Italian wife’s reluctant immigration to New England in the 1920s and the drama that ensues.
This novel details the bittersweet immigrant experiences of a working-class Italian family in the rough-edged New Hampshire hamlet of Berlin, which include quite a multitude of sorrows. Assunta, a young, Italian wife and mother, is at the heart of the ensemble family saga, and she proves herself to be a born survivor—and nobody’s fool. It’s 1920 when she’s summoned to come to Ellis Island by her husband Camillo, who’s been forging a career in America for the last several years as a stonemason. But Camillo has also been having a long-standing affair with his French housekeeper, and Assunta soon realizes that she—and her children—don’t really know him very well at all. But, true to her vows, she takes on a motherly role in a land that’s not only full of opportunity, but also pain and disappointment. The first half covers Assunta’s initial months in America; the rest spans Prohibition, the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the rise of Axis-Italian fascism, and America’s entry into World War II—yet the book never feels rushed or overcrowded. It also addresses how all of these historical events affect and buffet the town of Berlin in general and the heroine’s growing (yet mortal) family in particular. Arsenault resists the temptation to make the characters’ emotions melodramatic, and he also eschews sepia-toned sentimentality. Neither does he try to hammer this family saga into a statement about what America means. The results may lack poetry and vigorous histrionics, but the unhurried, direct prose does have an appealing, newspaperlike verisimilitude.
A straightforwardly told chronicle that will appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5390-8226-2
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2017
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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