by Donald Wetzel ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1997
A babbling stream of consciousness from a septuagenarian writer who is afraid he has Alzheimer's disease. Wetzel's father had Alzheimer's, as did an aunt and other members of his paternal line, and until his doctor assures him that at 74 he is out of danger, Wetzel is constantly on the lookout for it in himself, and on more than one occasion he's convinced that he has found it. Wetzel's seven-year-long obsession is presented to the reader as an outing, a longish drive with the author as he confronts the nature of aging and of dementia in a vague and roundabout way, with sidetracks into both early youth and the literary imagination. He travels back in time to ponder the unconsummated flirtation/love between himself and a younger cousin, thinks back on his own father's descent into dementia, and wonders about this legacy from a man who disowned him in every way but genetically. A large portion of the book describes time spent in a van in the company of an 83-year-old drunk who serves as a foil for the author's paranoia. Novelist Wetzel (A Bird in the Hand, 1973; The Lost Skiff, 1969; etc.) conveys very well, with his creative lack of punctuation and multi-parenthetical prose, the inner workings of his slightly unlatched mind, although this unlatching never really seems to the reader to sound like the early stages of Alzheimer's. It seems more like what, in fact, it turns out to be: the uninhibited, often scatological, and not obviously rewarding ramblings of an old man.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-877946-94-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 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
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
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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