A unique, often marvelous memoir of discovery.
Schmidt recounts his lifelong quest to understand his father, a journalist who fled Germany on the eve of World War II, in this investigative memoir.
Schmidt’s father, Pascasio Trujillo, was not like other fathers in 1930s Berlin. He didn’t live with Schmidt and his brother, Roni, or their mother, Klara, though his infrequent visits were a source of joy. Schmidt knew that his father had come from La Gomera in the Canary Islands and that he had a mother and sister in Cuba. One day in 1939, Pascasio arrived abruptly at the apartment and said they needed to leave Germany immediately. Klara refused, so Pascasio went without them. “That Friday morning changed me,” remembers Schmidt. “I would search for an answer most of my life. I wanted my father back. Even after a lifetime, I still hear Pascasio tearing down the stairs, two and three steps at a time.” He would encounter his father again, years later, though his search for answers took much longer and crisscrossed the globe, from Hitler’s Berlin to Nazi-occupied Poland to Franco’s Spain, Castro’s Cuba, the border-crossing highways of Central America, the safe haven of Canada, and ultimately to the Canary Islands of Pascasio’s birth. Along the way, Schmidt’s search for his father becomes one for himself as the absence of one man becomes the crucible in which another is forged. Schmidt writes in an elegant, thoughtful prose that captures the author’s quiet but insistent pining for understanding: “In Madrid, I got off the plane and slowly regained my bearings. From Pascasio’s last short letter, I had the impression that he looked forward to seeing me. I was sure he would be curious about my experience meeting his Cuban mother. I was so surprised when he did not ask.” The book is long, and not every chapter is thrilling, but Schmidt provides a first-person account of so many fascinating times and places that it more than makes up for the lulls. The enigma of Pascasio becomes secondary to the experience of viewing major developments of the 20th century through one man’s personal development.
A unique, often marvelous memoir of discovery.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2465-3
Page Count: 648
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
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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