An intriguing, if occasionally rambling, tale of a sometimes-solitary life.
A thoughtful memoir about growing up on a ranch in the mountains of Northern California, punctuated with philosophical musings on societal changes over the past seven decades.
Beck’s debut takes readers on a long journey over mountainous trails, through the vast acreage of his family’s cattle-rearing land—some of which they owned, some of which they leased. He writes about how his connection to that land, and to the wild and domesticated animals that populated it, became the defining influence in his life. In later years, he found himself in the more citified world of Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where he became a designer and teacher in the theater department, but he never really left the ranch, either physically or emotionally. The product of a father who taught him “to be a man” and a mother who sought to protect him from physical harm, Beck seems to have incorporated these opposing forces into a strenuous and soulful life. He shows his artistic side through reproductions of his rather charming watercolors, which he scatters throughout the book. His words, however, focus on the excitement, adventures and misadventures of running the ranch, which he mostly accomplished on horseback. He tells of how his passion for horses began long before he could mount and ride them: “From the time I had enough balance to even attempt to straddle a horse, live or imaginary, I would, by God! Grow up to be a horseman.” The narrative is sometimes unnecessarily encumbered by the names of trails, streams, rocks and hills, most of which readers will soon forget. But the essence of the countryside and the harsh details of ranching come across vividly and sensually. He doesn’t include significant biographical information about his wife, children or adult home life in these recollections; rather, this is the joyful, poignant story of one man’s changing relationship with land and beast.
An intriguing, if occasionally rambling, tale of a sometimes-solitary life.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491093351
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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