by Igor Sazevich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2018
A heartfelt and humorous memoir of a son of immigrants.
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An artist and architect looks back on his unconventional life.
Born in San Francisco in 1929, Sazevich was the son of Russian émigrés and named after Alexander Borodin’s 1890 opera Prince Igor. After a brief, early stint in interwar Paris—where his father worked as a painter and his mother as a hat maker—Sazevich’s family returned to San Francisco in 1935. He’s lived for much of his life, and he writes about the city in impressive detail in this debut memoir. Something of a loner in his youth, he attended classes at the local chapter of the communist newspaper People’s Daily World as a teenage writing student. Soon after, in an early display of literary ambition, he wrote a play in an attempt to “express to the world the plight of the downtrodden.” After briefly attending San Francisco City College, Sazevich transferred: “As soon as I walked onto the campus of UC Berkeley,” he recalls, “I knew that the years of being difficult and bored had come to an end.” In 1953, he was drafted into the Army, which postponed his architectural studies at Berkeley. Like much of his biography, Sazevich’s Army experiences proved unusual; somehow, he was promoted to be captain of the 37th Engineer Group tennis team and was sent to Frankfurt, Germany. After returning to California, he resumed his courtship with a woman named Natasha, whose aunt married a member of the Romanov family, whom he eventually married. Throughout this book, the author’s life is marked by readable, remarkable, and often humorous experiences. Sazevich has a brisk prose style that’s full of honesty and humor; often, the writing is action-driven, but he occasionally issues somber reflections, as when he recalls a road trip with his father during his own late teens: “Looking back now, I understand much of what bound us so closely: not just love but curiosity, strong survival instincts, and a wonder at being alive amid undiscovered beauty.” The eccentric personalities of his larger-than-life parents loom large in this remembrance, and Sazevich writes movingly about their lives as well as his own.
A heartfelt and humorous memoir of a son of immigrants.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73232-693-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Reyes Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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