edited by Erika Berg ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2015
An illuminating work of children’s hardship and self-expression.
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Debut author Berg edits a collection of art from young Myanmar refugees.
This book of visual stories includes work by escapees of what Berg terms “the longest-running civil war in the world”: the internal conflicts that have destabilized Myanmar (formerly Burma) ever since it first gained independence from Britain in 1948. With this anthology, she attempts to portray that war using displaced children’s paintings and drawings: “They illustrate that emotions conveyed and evoked by a single narrative image can tell a story of a thousand words, open hearts and build bridges of understanding,” she writes. The images are the result of workshops she conducted with refugee children in which they drew their responses to questions about their lives in Myanmar, their experiences as refugees, and their dreams of the future. Each work is accompanied by a brief passage that offers historical context and some of the artist’s personal experiences. There are accounts of massacres, prison camps, executions, and forced evictions, but also of courageous escapes and assistance from strangers. Many illustrations of schools, doctors, cities, and landscapes represent their artists’ visions of life after the conflict ends. The book is a beautifully laid-out art piece with full-color images on high-quality paper, and Berg keeps the art and the experiences of the children front and center; politics remain peripheral, invoked only to explain situations. Although many of the images may tug at the heartstrings (or cause a sinking sensation in the gut), there’s an optimism in the work that speaks to the indefatigable cheeriness of children. The young artists are idiosyncratic enough that their distinct personalities shine through their pictures and, as Berg claims, they really do say more than the text. In one painting, for example, a group of smiling refugees stands in a boat crossing a body of water at night, with dark figures looming on the shore: “They woried [sic] about soldier,” 11-year-old Siang Tha Dim writes in thought bubbles above their heads. “They woried about, they might fall down!”
An illuminating work of children’s hardship and self-expression.Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9908910-0-0
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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