by Frank R. Zindler ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An often intriguing, if overlong, memoir about a life outside the mainstream.
Zindler (Through Atheist Eyes, 2011, etc.) explores his long life as an atheist activist in this remembrance.
The author, who was born in the late 1930s, has witnessed the great changes in American society over the years. Drawing on his experiences as an evolutionary biologist, a prominent atheist, and a gay man who spent the majority of his life in the closet, he examines the battles that he’s waged to free people from what sees as the oppressive influence of the Bible. “The voices that echo and reverberate inside my head deserve to be allowed to speak one final time before they slip into eternal silence,” he writes in an introduction; to that end, he recounts his “many lives” and the people he met along the way, from his childhood on a farm outside Benton Harbor, Michigan, and his intense teenage religiosity following the sudden death of his father, to his long marriage to his wife, Ann, and his personal development as a strident atheist and out gay man. Additionally, Zindler discusses his friendship with the secular activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of the organization American Atheists who, with her son and granddaughter, was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1995; he goes on to claim that the actual motivations for the killings differ from the official account. Throughout his book, Zindler’s prose is energetic, humane, and engaging, often revealing long-ago feelings as if they’re happening at the moment; for example, about the captain of a golf team, he writes, “Shod in golf shoes and wearing white shorts and a white polo shirt, he was Adonis come to earth. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel the pulsations in my neck. He was so close to me!” It’s a rather lengthy book, however, and some parts of the author’s life yield more compelling stories than others; his tales of his activist days, though, are particular standouts. Indeed, Zindler is such a sharp, personable presence on the page that he manages to carry the reader through the less interesting stretches.
An often intriguing, if overlong, memoir about a life outside the mainstream.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-57884-039-7
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2018
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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