by Heidi L. Kline ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A riveting but overwhelming memoir that might have benefited from a more focused approach.
A Canadian woman’s remembrance of her heartbreaking childhood with her twin sister.
Debut author Kline and her identical twin sibling, Holly, were born in London, Ontario, in 1966. Their mother, the author says, found it difficult to cope with them from the start, often leaving them in soiled diapers for hours on end. After their father left the family, she says, their mother’s drinking, partying, and physical abuse only increased. Although their mother adored their older sister, Theresa, she treated the twins with cold indifference, the author writes—even as they suffered extreme torment from their bullying brother, Todd. Kline goes on to write that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by neighborhood boys, starting when she was 5 years old, and that she endured further abuse in incidents involving her mother, her father, and an older gentleman in the neighborhood who was later arrested for murder. Kline’s story offers a barrage of horrors, as seemingly every new person she met brought her pain and suffering—from her young school friend Michael, who was decapitated by a passing city bus, to her stepfather, Hunter, who dug graves on their farm as part of a plot to murder the family. It’s dark and difficult reading, made even more intense by accounts of seemingly supernatural occurrences; from an early age, Kline writes, she and her sister were capable of picking up otherworldly messages—voices that warned them when they were in danger, or even tried to comfort them. Once, the author says, a psychic explicitly told her that she would one day write a book that would “help millions of people.” These fantastic elements lend the book a frightening tone in the beginning, but an account of a UFO encounter simply feels bizarre. Still, Kline does excellent work in reconstructing a troubling past. She paints her memories with excruciating detail, but also with a slightly detached tone that gives the accounts a grave realism. However, the book addresses so many shocking events that readers may find it difficult to process it all.
A riveting but overwhelming memoir that might have benefited from a more focused approach.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3671-7
Page Count: 313
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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