A fusty, indignant report—dated 1983—from Tibet by Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet, not reviewed), the now-celebrated adventurer who briefly returned to his “second home” 30 years after fleeing China’s invasion. In 1945 the Austrian author escaped from a British prisoner-of-war camp, hoofed it over the Trans-Himalayan range, and eventually arrived in Lhasa, capitol of Tibet. There he found what he took to be an idyll: a sublime mix of Tibetan Buddhism, ancient customs, and dust-free air that made landscape colors incandescent. He became an important figure in the country—chief engineer, tutor of the Dalai Lama—but left as the Chinese commenced their occupation. In 1982 he was able to revisit Tibet during the “Chinese-staged thaw,” and he was by turns heartbroken and inspired by what he observed: Valuable cultural treasures had been destroyed by the invaders, and stories of concentration camps, forced labor, and political murders sent him reeling. Yet the country’s religion was still strong, and there continued both armed resistance to the Chinese and an unquashable national will. His two sojourns in the country make for some intriguing before-and-after comparisons, and his comments on particulars of Tibetan Buddhism are revealing. But the tone of the book is dryly nostalgic, when not bitter, and Harrer’s opinions sometimes seem jarringly contradictory. He rails against what the Chinese have done to the country—razing monasteries, imprisoning and killing nationals—and then inexplicably suggests that China and Tibet might be well served by a partnership, with Tibet happily becoming “part of that enormous yellow state.” Moreover, every so often he lets the feudalist in him shine through unforgivably in making unfortunate remarks on his longing for a land “where superstition would be the poetry of life.” The insights are worth the cover price anyhow, despite the author’s occasional reactionary comments and his priggishness.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87477-925-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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