A guide for aspiring senior athletes and an inspirational shoutout to victims of abuse.
A runner, denied her chance to compete as a teenager, returns to the challenge almost 50 years later—and finds her path to self-understanding in the process.
In 1959, Kern (100 Whispered Words, 2015, etc.), an Austrian teenager, was offered the chance to compete as a sprinter for a place on the Olympic team. She was ecstatic. Then her father said “no!” and slapped her to the floor. It was a major disappointment but didn’t really come as a surprise. He had been beating and verbally abusing her for years. After his death two years later, the author went on to snag some acting and modeling jobs in Europe. Fast-forward to 2004. Kern was living in Los Angeles and from a casual acquaintance she learned about the “Senior Olympics.” A new spark had been lit. In 2007, almost five decades after having been denied her chance to compete, the author acquired a coach and returned to training. This entailed an extraordinarily demanding schedule, especially for a woman working as a real estate agent, the manager of her apartment building, and a part-time interior design consultant while writing several books. It also involved a substantial level of pain, as one body part or another rebelled against the intense exercises. In April 2008, at the coach’s suggestion, Kern began a journal to keep track of her workouts, diet, and thoughts. This memoir, covering her experiences from 2008 to 2013, is culled from that journal. As she deftly reveals details of her past, readers gradually learn that the physical pain mirrored the psychological trauma she had kept tucked away for decades, what she calls “the Monster within”—the fear that she was not good enough, not worthy: “Whatever goes through my head is only intensified because I am still wrestling with my father.” So much of the very ably written text is devoted to the minuscule details of her training program that readers not involved in athletics will likely become restless. But her story of overcoming layers of damage caused by her father’s violent attacks is compelling.
A guide for aspiring senior athletes and an inspirational shoutout to victims of abuse.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4575-5298-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 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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