A stunningly thorough and poignant study of African-Americans.
A debut history book focuses on a New Jersey cemetery while exploring the whole spectrum of the black experience in the region.
Buck and Mills both have deep familial ties to the Stoutsburg Cemetery near Hopewell, New Jersey. They have jointly served as trustees of the cemetery’s association for more than 30 years. In 2006, someone distraught over the possibility that a nearby but unofficial burial ground would soon be bulldozed contacted Buck. The authors immersed themselves in research in order to find documentary evidence of the land’s hallowed purpose, a task that begat this extended “detective-labor-of-love.” The result is a panoramic history of the African-American experience in New Jersey and the region, concentrating on the Stoutsburg Cemetery, a powerful reminder of the segregation that persisted long after the demise of slavery. In fact, a state law made it criminal to bury blacks and whites on the same grounds; it was finally overturned in 1884. The historical landscape traversed is expansive. The authors discuss the centrality of the church for African-Americans in the area, the history of the black population’s military service, and the nature of black landownership, which provided “real power and sovereignty” for otherwise disenfranchised citizens. They also dispel the myth that slavery in the North was more humanely practiced than in the South. New Jersey was in fact a brutal participant in and advocate of slave ownership. At the heart of this moving chronicle is the authors’ impassioned desire to “break the cycle of America’s historical omissions” regarding its black citizens, whose significant contributions have often been consigned to oblivion. “The challenges that African Americans face in proving their family history is a direct result of the lack of primary documentation—records of accomplishments or achievements in their lives,” the authors assert. The study is meticulously documented and written in prose that is always lucid and often stirring. The authors tend to confront readers with mountains of detail—family genealogies and even recipes are provided—but given the mission to disinter a buried history, it’s hard to quibble with their zeal.
A stunningly thorough and poignant study of African-Americans.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941948-08-8
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Wild River Consulting and Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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