A well-researched and accessible examination of Fountaingrove’s utopian society.
A history book focuses on a California utopian community from its 19th-century origins to the destruction of its remnants by wildfires in the 21st century.
Casey (The Double Life of Laurence Oliphant, 2015) and LeBaron (Santa Rosa, 1993) center their study of Fountaingrove on minibiographies of its three most famous members: Thomas Lake Harris, Laurence Oliphant, and Kanaye Nagasawa. Harris, Fountaingrove’s founder, was a product of the religious mania that swept New York state in the 1820s and ’30s. That wave created an array of new religions and philosophies that ranged from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith, to the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While Harris’ ideas challenged traditional social conventions with notions of the duality of masculinity/femininity that existed in every human and contradictory views on sexuality and celibacy, he managed to convince hundreds of followers to leave their homes and join his promised second Garden of Eden, Fountaingrove, in Santa Rosa. Indeed, two of his most famous followers, Oliphant and Nagasawa, made transoceanic journeys to join him. Oliphant gave up a career as a British diplomat and Member of Parliament, and Nagasawa left a life as a samurai in Japan. Nagasawa’s tale is the book’s strongest contribution, as he was one of the first Japanese immigrants to land in the United States. His story and eventual leadership of Fountaingrove are an important chapter of early Japanese-American history. Though essentially a small community in Santa Rosa, Fountaingrove had an impact that extended from New York during the Second Great Awakening across the globe to England and Japan. Featuring black-and-white archival photographs, this rigorous volume should be of interest not just to Santa Rosa residents curious about Fountaingrove’s presence (and uniquely designed round barn that left its architectural stamp for nearly a century) in their city, but also readers intrigued by the new movements of the 19th century. While the authors occasionally overuse lengthy quotes from primary sources, the narrative remains engaging as it deftly explores the captivating figures who defined Fountaingrove.
A well-researched and accessible examination of Fountaingrove’s utopian society.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-17702-0
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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