A relentlessly probing memoir of a search for self-knowledge.
Excavating the past unearths festering wounds.
In this final volume of a trilogy about children of Holocaust survivors, journalist Epstein (Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, 1997, etc.) decided to focus on her own “atypical adolescence,” investigating especially how her parents’ trauma had affected her “in the intimate realms of sex and friendship.” The project, she thought naively, “would be easy, even a lark.” She could not have been more wrong. To help her recall details, in 2000, she flew from her home in Massachusetts, where she lived with her husband and sons, to California to reconnect with Robbie, who had been a close family friend and later a lover. Robbie had been a gifted musician, and Epstein had imagined that he would become a “brilliant, charismatic, celebrated” performer. But the 55-year-old man she met was far different: overweight, emotionally volatile, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and, he tells her, manic-depression. Although Epstein praises him as her “collaborator and coach,” he often erupted with impatient and harsh remarks. Robbie is just one among many unsympathetic characters populating the memoir. Others include the author’s self-absorbed mother, who had disclosed a shocking revelation the day before Epstein began psychoanalysis; a “narcissistic, patronizing” cousin; and the husband of her nanny, whom she came to believe sexually abused her when she was 3 years old. As soon as she embarked on her journey into the past, Epstein was overcome with grief, frequently weeping, hyperventilating, and falling “into altered states of consciousness.” She decided to have phone sessions with the taciturn therapist Dr. M., who had treated her 20 years before, recording her side of their conversation, enabling her to convey every detail. Candid and penetrating, the memoir nevertheless is overwhelmed by those details, as Epstein meticulously unravels the fabric of her past. Some of her closest friends, she writes, “tired of my doubling back over the same subjects over and over again.” Readers will likely agree.
A relentlessly probing memoir of a search for self-knowledge.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9614696-6-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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