A readable, inspiring memoir that displays a balanced, surprisingly reverent view of the Marine Corps and military service.
TV comedy writer White recalls the grueling yet confidence-building three-month Marine Corps boot camp training he endured as a still-closeted teenager in 1979.
Having moved numerous times throughout his childhood, at the age of 18, the author lived with his mother and brothers in Dallas. On a whim and with no future goals, White agreed to accompany his friend, a recent Air Force Academy cadet, and enlist in the Marine Corps. Physically unfit, admittedly effeminate, and considerably underweight, he was suddenly forced to share tight living quarters with dozens of straight young men and endure arduous physical endurance challenges, not to mention brutally demanding drill instructors. White lived in fear that he would be outed as gay, which could have led to a dishonorable discharge or, worse, a beating. Yet years before the passage of “don't ask, don't tell,” the boot camp proved to be a tremendously equalizing experience. As White eventually began to excel in areas he never anticipated, he also realized that each recruit, no matter the level of athletic prowess or supposed masculinity, was dealing with anxieties and shortcomings in a united quest to complete the course. Ultimately, the author’s fear gradually took a back seat to his more urgent desire to not only achieve a meaningful goal, but also gain acceptance. “I gained confidence from membership in a group I never thought I could belong to, a group I never thought would accept me,” he writes. “I adopted the same attitude they did; I did everything anyone did. I was a man with a job, a man who happened to be gay. Being a Marine is hard work and takes a lot of focus, practice, and dedication. I learned that I had to respect myself if I wanted others to respect me.” The author demonstrates that respect and delivers a heartening coming-of-age story.
A readable, inspiring memoir that displays a balanced, surprisingly reverent view of the Marine Corps and military service.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9967103-2-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Querelle Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2015
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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