Original, memorable and unlike anything else that has come from the era. A fine contribution to Chinese letters in...
The “Garbo of Chinese letters” speaks, and most eloquently.
Novelist Chang, who left China in 1956 and died in the US in 1995, is perhaps better thought of as China’s answer to the always curious Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project, less the arcane language, or perhaps even to Susan Sontag. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Chang returned to her native city, took up residence on the top floor of an apartment building whose elevator man, even, was “well read and erudite, of rare cultivation” and from her aerie made pregnant observations on the things she saw in everyday life. Strangely, the Japanese occupiers do not occupy her overmuch; instead, Chang writes with keen self-awareness of her petit-bourgeois, almost untroubled life in the larger context of a rapidly changing China. One thing that did draw her attention was a long-emerging culture war that foreshadowed the political war to follow Japan’s defeat; she writes, for instance, of the “young intellectuals [who] condemned all that was traditional, even all that was Chinese,” while conservatives, “shocked out of their complacency, redoubled their efforts to suppress them.” (Mao and company, it appears, were among the conservatives.) Just so, Chang writes of the decline of kowtowing, a ritual that she was able to perform with some difficulty but preferred to reserve for special occasions. “It is only now when the custom is about to die out entirely,” she writes, “that it is mourned.” Resolutely modern, Chang finds only a little to mourn in the rise of social dancing, which had earlier been all but unknown; though she mistakenly attributes the tango to Spain and not Argentina, it seems to have fascinated her, even though her peers disliked it for its “polite promiscuity.” And on the matter of promiscuity, Chang’s description of a weathered prostitute trying to buy half a pound of pork in a proper butcher shop is priceless.
Original, memorable and unlike anything else that has come from the era. A fine contribution to Chinese letters in translation.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-13138-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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