A memoir that offers a promising look into the early 20th century but never brings the same excitement to its tales of more...
A debut author traces his family’s history, decade by decade, from the early 1900s to the present day.
In each chapter, Bright summarizes the major historical events of a 10-year span before recounting specific stories of himself and his family in detail. The author’s grandfather, Tom Bright, was married six times, and the family eventually spread from Ontario to Montana. They were mostly hardworking farmers, and these late pioneers in the first few chapters provide the most intriguing portions of his story, as well as wonderful, old photographs. The author’s recollections of his father, Ray Bright, riding in a cattle car across Canada in 1907 to start a new homestead are engaging, and other rich historical details bring the family’s first isolated farms to life. In 1923, Ray proposed to a local Ontario girl named Lottie Sampson, and in 1929, the author was born; he would eventually have a total of seven siblings. Thanks to his parents’ work ethic, the family would grow up “liv[ing] like kings” by Depression-era standards, despite not having electricity until 1949. Bright eventually attended theology school, where he married a young teacher named Marian Roberts; they lived with her mother, had five children, and taught at various schools around Canada throughout the prosperous 1950s and ’60s. Bright’s memoir diligently documents vacations, births, and job changes up to the present day, including Marian’s tragic passing and his new happy marriage to Betty Hamm in 2009. The inclusion of so many precise details makes the first few chapters feel dense with engaging material. However, later chapters, which cover more familiar narratives of road trips and graduations, become repetitive. The story and prose are most interesting when Bright examines his ancestors, instead of himself; several of them deserved more time in the spotlight, including the author’s eccentric vaudevillian uncle, Hart DeMille. Later accounts of new jobs and weddings, though, never seem like more than a thorough chronology intended for Bright’s immediate family, and general readers may wish for more stories of the pioneers.
A memoir that offers a promising look into the early 20th century but never brings the same excitement to its tales of more recent years.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-9039-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
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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