A historically intriguing and tender retrospective.
In this debut book, a writer offers a tribute to his mother, who left Denmark after World War II to marry a handsome American soldier.
Born in 1923 in a small town in Denmark, Inge Elizabeth Buus grew up on the family farm, a successful enterprise. But she did not take to country life. She decided to study nursing and, to that end, moved to Copenhagen after finishing high school. Nursing was satisfying, but her ankles, weakened from rickets, became compromised, and Inge secured a high-paying job as a bookkeeper for “Burmeister and Wain, the largest shipyard in Denmark.” The Germans occupied Denmark in 1940. Although the country was under the yoke of the Third Reich, Hitler’s demand for new ships brought temporary prosperity. Peterson’s attention to the details of the war as experienced in Denmark creates one of the more captivating sections of the book. Following the Nazis’ surrender, Robert, an American soldier stationed in Germany, took his 10-day leave in Copenhagen. At a dance for GIs and British soldiers, he met Inge. After a week’s courtship, Inge knew she had found her life partner; 10 months later, in September 1946, she sailed to America to marry him. The author was born in November 1947. Over the course of his mother’s life, she would make 24 trips back to Denmark, 11 of those accompanied by Peterson. His comprehensive account of those journeys, including, it seems, a citing of every tourist and off-the-beaten-track spot they visited, forms a travelogue of sorts within the larger narrative. Especially close to his mother, the author delivers recollections of his own life that primarily concern activities he shared with his parents, especially Inge. He does devote several pages to a strange and tiresome obsession over what he believes was an inadequate third grade education. And some readers are likely to find his occasional political snark off-putting. He refers to payroll taxes as supporting “restrictive government programs…designed to mollify ‘the little people.’ ” The generally engaging prose is augmented with a substantial supply of black-and-white and color family photographs.
A historically intriguing and tender retrospective.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949735-76-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Ideopage Press Solutions
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
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
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