An absorbing, unpredictable life story inside and outside the church.
Grossman’s engaging debut memoir contrasts her years as a postulant nun with her later, secular life.
During her all-American upbringing in small-town Illinois, Grossman defined her life by her relationships to both the Catholic Church and the summer carnival, which serve as this well-structured memoir’s symbolic poles. As “a good girl, programmed into perfection mode,” she instinctively avoided the “sin and debauchery” that the carnival seemed to represent. Instead, she found comfort in the discipline of the church of her “grandfatherly God.” However, she became troubled by this strict division between body and spirit when she entered adulthood. As a teenager, she wore tight skirts and tried to attract male attention. She took her failure at romance as proof that she actually had a religious vocation, although friends and family tried to dissuade her. Once inside the convent, she found that the regulations were stringent: One should never criticize or question nor pursue any sort of individuality. “Convent rules whittled away my personality,” Grossman writes. She endured five years as Sister Greta before a chance viewing of the 1965 movie The Sound of Music convinced her there was life outside the church. The day she left, June 23, 1966, marks both the beginning of her new life and her book’s midpoint. The memoir’s latter half may be less compelling than the hothouse atmosphere of her Catholic formation, but its lyrical descriptions and excellent re-created dialogue, based on contemporaneous journals, enliven the story. The author caught up on everything she missed, attending feminist discussion groups, seeing risqué films—and resuming dating. Before long, she was engaged to an Alabama journalist who bought them both luxurious clothes and an extended European honeymoon. “Self-indulgence was a novelty,” she admits, but their lavish lifestyle masked fundamental incompatibility. A Chicago teaching career and single parenthood might not have been what Grossman always envisioned, but she now gracefully accepts the course her life has taken: “We were not a storybook family, but a dear family nonetheless.”
An absorbing, unpredictable life story inside and outside the church.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-95672-5
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Gretchen Grossman
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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