An intimate oral history of the silly, funny and lovely aspects of being a bridesmaid; readers can decide for themselves...
Vignettes from modern bridesmaids.
Writer and editor Lynch was in the midst of planning bachelorette parties and bridal showers for her sister when it dawned on her that being a bridesmaid is “one of the rare things that many women have in common by the time they turn thirty.” In this book, the author provides 60 snapshots of the experience from people as diverse as an ex-nun, a frat boy and the 13-year-old tomboy who carried Princess Diana’s 25-foot train. There’s also “The Scarlett O’Hara Look-Alike,” “The Drunk Bride’s Bridesmaid,” “The Jilted Ex” and “The Bridezilla Victim,” among others. Lynch recounts a Mormon wedding with 600 guests, a ceremony in a prison and another at Burning Man, where the bride and bridesmaid dressed alike in matching goggles and tutus. Other stories: a teenage bridesmaid who lost her virginity to the pianist at her brother’s wedding; a bride who kicked her bridesmaid out of her wedding for missing the third bridal shower; a bridesmaid who had to spend $37,000 to be in 12 weddings in three years. Weddings are always emotional times, and no one is in a better position to dish on the drama than the bridesmaid. From much of the evidence here, future brides will learn how their attendants really feel about those matching chiffon dresses. While 95 percent of bridesmaids will find something to bitch about, 100 percent are flattered to be chosen. Touching, weird and introspective stories let the reader draw her own conclusions about what it means to support a friend during one of life’s major transitions. As for the author, she confesses that her own wedding will be bridesmaid-less.
An intimate oral history of the silly, funny and lovely aspects of being a bridesmaid; readers can decide for themselves what they think about the modern wedding experience.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04177-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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