An unblinking and valuable portrait of hope.
A debut memoir chronicles surviving—and thriving—despite postpartum depression.
Growing up on a Mennonite farm in Canada, Tallman, one of 11 children, was no stranger to hard work. Her father was an abusive disciplinarian who mellowed as the years passed (she eventually forgave him), but her mother was a kind Christian woman who was loved by many. Tallman married, and after having a girl and a boy, it seemed like she had the perfect family. At the age of 41, she had just begun a new career as a chaplain in a veterans’ hospital when she unexpectedly became pregnant with her third child. After giving birth to a beautiful baby girl, she should have been happy—but she was not. Grieving the deaths of her mother and brother, she began to spiral deeper into overwhelming depression. At her darkest moments, she shockingly contemplated killing herself—and her baby. Desperate, she turned to her doctor and, after attempting to hang herself, she was committed to a psychiatric ward. Divided into three parts, this slim memoir begins with Tallman’s story and includes some typical color family photographs. In Part II, she veers from her personal account, claiming that resilience is the key to recovery and that anyone can develop it. In this thoughtful, essaylike discussion, the author writes that “Resilience is the Result of Hundreds of Tiny Steps.” More details of her own process of recovery would have made this advice stronger, but she does note that exercise helped and describes some therapy. In Part III, she cobbles together ideas for the prevention and care of postpartum depression (for example, education). Tallman’s smooth prose flows quickly, and even though some of the experiences she recounts were rough, her voice remains gentle. Her childhood anecdotes contain a vivid mixture of lovely images and sad memories—there’s the sweet smell of farm earth being tilled in spring, and then there are the horrifying times she was molested by a teacher. Always realistic, the author’s soothing suggestions can be a helpful beginners’ guide for those who are suffering similar trauma.
An unblinking and valuable portrait of hope.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4114-8
Page Count: 156
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 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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