Polokoff writes well, and for that—and his engaging humanity—the collection is to be recommended.
There is something for everyone in this collection of memoir snapshots. Heck, there is even a novella for good measure.
Debut memoirist Polokoff has lived a full life that’s not over yet. The man appears to have enormous energy even now in his late 80s. After starting out as an academic economist, he spent a long and successful career with the investment giant Merrill Lynch and also shouldered—graciously, happily—a ton of civic responsibilities in Buffalo, where he lived while working at the investment company (Florida seems to have been a second residence). He married twice and had three successful children. The first marriage ended in an amicable divorce; his second wife, Gina, continues to be his muse. He was a Navy lieutenant who saw action on a Landing Ship Tank in the Pacific theater in World War II. He is a pretty fair jazz pianist and a lifelong golfer. Topics covered, usually with four or five entries apiece, include his early life, his college days at Duke, his travels, his wartime experiences, his years and his friends at Merrill Lynch, and sections that are harder to describe, whimsical catchalls. But some section titles do give us their flavors: “Turning Points,” “Musings,” “Fascinating People,” and so forth. The novella is earnest, but fiction is not the man’s long suit: “Alex and Max” strikes one as a male sexual fantasy dressed as a morality tale. A memoir is only as engaging as its memoirist, and it’s almost impossible not to like Ed Polokoff. (How can you not like a man who dedicates his book to “Gloria and Gina, the two wives in my life”?) Polokoff is a shrewd judge of character, but sometimes his affection for others may skew his perspective. He is an enormously successful man who came from humble beginnings, but one never (with apologies to Chevy Chase) gets the sense that “I’m Ed Polokoff and you’re not.” Instead, he comes across as a real mensch who is grateful for the good life he has had. Personal photos are included: black and white and grainy, but perhaps that adds to their charm.
Polokoff writes well, and for that—and his engaging humanity—the collection is to be recommended.Pub Date: June 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0533165506
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
