An illuminating memoir of an American abroad that captures Arab and Israeli relations at a particular moment in time.
In this memoir, Lodge (The Lodge Women, 2014) recounts her immersion in the culture and politics of the Arab Middle East during a year in Amman, Jordan.
In 2006, Lodge, scion of the famous Boston family of politicians and diplomats, was invited to join her husband, Bob, in Amman. For the past three years, Bob had lived in that city serving as a consultant for a European electrical consortium operating in Iraq. Despite the dangers—Bob had only recently survived a suicide bombing at an Amman hotel—Lodge decided to make the move: “I felt it would be better to worry with him than without him,” she writes. Although the author and her husband would remain in Jordan for eight years, it was the first year that affected her most profoundly, exposing her to a cosmopolitan Arab society that she’d never known in the West. While Bob concentrated on his work in Iraq, Lodge took Arabic lessons and made friends with her neighbors in Jordan, many of whom were Palestinians whose families were displaced during the conflicts of 1948 and 1967. Her book is a month-by-month account of that first year from the spring of 2006 to the spring of 2007, recording her travels and encounters with Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and others, learning their family histories and their perspectives on contemporary politics. During a trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah, Lodge was able to witness how different religions, cultures, and governments interacted at checkpoints, in temples, during holidays, and in different languages. Lodge’s narration is characterized by a clipped, somewhat scattered prose style, typical of a diarist, as she recounts anecdotes from journeys and conversations: “Lebanon is in many ways the sister country to Jordan, with most of the elite here, all my female friends, having gone to the American University of Beirut. I celebrate when they celebrate. I mourn when they mourn.” Along the way, Lodge’s memoir interpolates numerous bits of history that illuminate the backstories of the places she goes and the people she meets. The book concludes with a pair of interviews that she conducted at the time—one with the King of Jordan’s uncle, Prince Hassan; the other with the Israeli Ambassador to Jordan, Jacob Rosen—and she effectively highlights their divergent views on the history and future of Arab-Israeli relations. Although she addresses topics that have already inspired a vast library’s worth of volumes, Lodge’s clear interest in the Arab side of the story—as an American civilian who was previously unfamiliar with that perspective—helps this work to stand out in that crowded field. It’s clear that the author is passionate about her subject, rooted as it is in her personal life. Although the book has some inherent limitations, given the author’s perspective as an outside observer, it offers many insights into the Jordanian point of view that readers may not have encountered elsewhere.
An illuminating memoir of an American abroad that captures Arab and Israeli relations at a particular moment in time.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-692-10011-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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