Childhood memories alternate with scenes of revolution and defeat in this complex work from a promising new voice.
A bloody 18th-century rebellion lives long in the memory of a Caribbean estate in Hall’s debut memoir.
The author was born in 1945 and grew up on a spice estate in Grenada called Belvidere, where planting and harvesting had gone on since the 18th century. The stilt-supported barracks of the laborers almost perfectly resembled the cabins of their enslaved ancestors, and their children were barred from exploring the parasite-ridden outdoors or the kitchen buildings where food was prepared on stone slabs and “dried wood and oil-rich nutmeg branches, placed between the stones, served as cooking fuel.” At Belvidere, from a perch on his family’s front doorsill, Hall heard stories of the estate’s notorious former occupant, Julien Fédon, and the bloody rebellion he incited in the spring of 1795 that “seized and plundered British estates,” assumed control of the island (except for the seat of government), and eventually cost the lives of thousands of Grenadians. Inspired by the revolutions in Haiti, the United States, and France, Fédon, a seasoned French officer, masterfully played various sides of the struggle—French, British, Grenadian, and Hessian—against one another and nearly succeeded in changing the history of the Western Hemisphere. In this volume, Fédon’s story alternates with chapters in which Hall tells of his own childhood on the plantation in a sweet, nostalgic tone. He describes it, convincingly, as a melting pot, encompassing “poor whites” and people whose skin color he describes as “black as tar” as well as plenty of East Indians. Among the latter was the author’s adopted mother, an illiterate farm laborer who nearly burst with happiness when her son was admitted to exclusive schools. “Wherever people came from,” one wise old resident told him, “we were one people when we worked at Belvidere.” Hall brings the world of his youth to life with anecdotes that live up to the high billing of their chapter titles. Readers learn about the fascinating mix of religions at Belvidere as well as about the custom of swinging children over gravestones to protect them from curses; sightings of ghosts in the dismal woods; and the legend of the “loupgarou,” island vampires who were allegedly capable of manifesting themselves as giant balls of fire. As a result, Hall’s book will absorb readers for hours.
Childhood memories alternate with scenes of revolution and defeat in this complex work from a promising new voice.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9970190-0-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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