A disorderly work that still offers a few captivating glimpses of pioneer life.
Brown retells tales of his northwest Alabama family in this historical debut.
The author’s grandfather Clover McKinley Palmer was born in January 1899, the son of Blue John Palmer and Mary Dizenia. The author speculates that Clover’s conception took place in a field of “freshly bloomed purplish clover heads,” inspiring the boy’s unusual name. His grandfather’s legend, he writes, is “like all legends…a convoluted layering of facts and fables.” The opening of this pioneer tale describes Clover’s courtship and secret marriage to the author’s grandmother Cora Lee Goodson, which took place in the shade of a pine tree on a country road. The author then veers off to recount stories of Clover’s forebears; many of these are engaging, such as that of his third great-grandfather Dr. Russell Porter Palmer, who witnessed a cowgirl accidentally shoot her own horse, and his fourth great-grandfather William Mansell, who married a woman named Morning Dove White of the Cherokee Nation. The study is loaded with intrigue—including a familial link to Elvis Presley—and it will likely prove to be a valuable record for the author’s family. However, the execution is weak. The author rejects the use of a linear timeline, and as a result, his focus wanders back and forth between various ancestors, complicating the narrative and making the text difficult to follow. Stylistically, Brown’s writing is conversational but repetitive; for instance, he often draws upon a clumsy kaleidoscope metaphor: “Life is that way and the kaleidoscope within which it is contained may twist and turn in infinite directions.” Six pages later, he writes: “the kaleidoscope twisted and turned over the next decade,” and two pages on, he refers to “destiny’s kaleidoscope.” These references continue throughout and become tiring. The overall lack of organization is epitomized by the book’s idiosyncratic ending, which consists of the lyrics of two ballads followed by recipes and ancestral photographs.
A disorderly work that still offers a few captivating glimpses of pioneer life.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1537-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
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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