Impressively down-to-earth and upbeat, this memoir recounts making the most of disappointments.
A debut autobiography commemorates a four-decade marriage that ended in divorce but opened the way for a new relationship.
Raised in 1950s Quebec, Bruce had romantic notions about marriage. At McGill University, she went on a blind date with Peter Scott, whom she would marry in 1968, at age 22. As sexually liberated as the ’60s are reputed to be, Bruce was sheltered and didn’t know what to expect. “Having married at such tender ages, we basically grew up together,” she explains. Within three years, they had two children. The family moved from Canada to Sydney, Australia, for Peter’s work. Bruce undertook graduate studies in counseling and intermittently served as a research assistant or math and physics teacher. Peter’s drinking was a persistent, low-lying worry, eventually landing him in rehab. However, it hit her with the force of an earthquake when Bruce saw her husband with another woman in 2009. This was Serena, an Alcoholics Anonymous friend, and despite marriage counseling, he left to be with her. At the time of their separation, the couple had been married 41 years. While earlier sections seem like mere rundowns of facts, the book comes alive at this point, as Bruce explores her loneliness and midlife re-creation. “I felt like a toddler, learning to walk and figuring out my identity,” she writes. She captures her situation with insightful details that might not occur to outsiders, like the challenge of cooking for one. Her adventures in online dating become repetitive, but before long she met Chris, who proposed on a trip to Arizona in 2013, exactly three years after she signed her separation agreement. Rather than the expected bitterness or gloating (when Peter split from Serena after a few years), Bruce expresses gratitude for her ex-husband’s actions because she has now found “the love of my life and—even more importantly—myself, my own strength.” But she is realistic about life’s imperfections as well as her own and her new partner’s shortcomings.
Impressively down-to-earth and upbeat, this memoir recounts making the most of disappointments.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1288-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2017
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
