Those with a family history of ADHD should especially enjoy these wry autobiographical writings.
Collected magazine columns convey the everyday familial and professional struggles of a man with ADHD.
All but one of these pieces first appeared in ADDitude Magazine over the course of eight years. South (Aloha Island, 2012) has worked as a television writer and producer in Hollywood and as an off-Broadway playwright. He perceives that ADHD turns his life into a roller coaster of successes and failures. Here’s how he describes his between-jobs anxiety: “Self-loathing sharks swam in and tore everything left all to pieces.” When he had a breakdown at age 49, a psychologist told him that, given his various behavioral and cognitive issues, “it’s surprising that you’re able to function at all.” On a daily basis, he gets distracted and loses concentration or becomes frustrated at his forgetfulness. For years, he self-medicated with alcohol, and two previous marriages ended in divorce. All the same, he feels that the invisibility of his disability causes people to take it less seriously: South tells how a woman in his writing group accused him of being too “normal” and exaggerating his issues. In fact, he’s just developed coping strategies, such as organizing his thoughts and rehearsing what he’s going to say. The author’s two children also have ADHD, and some of the most poignant essays express his feelings for them. In “Sixteen,” he marvels at how his daughter, Coco, has grown up, while in “Piece of My Heart,” he puts his son’s poor decisions into perspective by remembering a low point in 1968 when, as a college dropout into drugs, he was lucky to have his parents shelve everything to come check up on him. Pieces on his elderly father’s brain injury and time in a rehab center reinforce the intergenerational nature of the book. South’s father was also a problem drinker, and the author worries that his son is headed the same way. These essays are well-structured and congenial, re-creating dialogue and everyday family life in a relatable manner.
Those with a family history of ADHD should especially enjoy these wry autobiographical writings.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994878-0-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Rattlesnake Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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