A forthright and affecting series of autobiographical sketches of Christian life.
A Christian devotional offers a Southerner’s ruminations.
The latest book from Cunningham (River Ruckus, Bloody Bay, 2014, etc.) is an old-fashioned faith devotional buttressed by the author’s stories about living in the American South. He grew up in metropolitan Mobile, sometimes visited his grandparents in rural Alabama, and eventually graduated from the University of Alabama. As a result, he has a broad swath of colorful life experiences on which to draw in this slim work of Scripture lessons clothed in various personal reflections. In each of the 27 quick chapters (generally two or three pages), Cunningham opens with a Bible quotation, proceeds to a personal anecdote of some kind, links that vignette to a biblical story, offers a prayer specifically keyed to the lesson conveyed, provides a Bible reflection, includes relevant Scriptural passages, and leaves a space for readers to make notes. For instance, he opens one chapter with memories of the years he waited to receive an upright piano that had been a legacy from a beloved grandmother, connects them to the far greater number of years Abraham waited for God to fulfill his promises, and supplies a straightforward homily: “We have no reason to doubt God. He promises us that if we, like Abraham, wait patiently and continue in faith, we’ll obtain our inheritance.” When Cunningham remembers visiting the Greater Gulf State Fair House of Mirrors as a child, he elaborates: Mirrors “cannot show our spiritual condition. God’s perfect spiritual mirror, His Word, does that. Every time we read it, we observe our spiritual reflection.” There’s a very inviting, back-to-basics, personal aspect to the author’s approach here, and he works this element with careful but unobtrusive skill. This is effectively balanced with some standard lessons from Scriptures, delivered to his readers in intimate terms, almost always with a distinctly Southern flair. “Lot’s experience teaches us an important lesson: don’t flirt with sin, nor even go near it,” he writes about the famous story of Sodom and Gomorrah. “Sure, it may appear attractive on the outside, all shiny and full of fun, like a brand new pickup truck or a freshly painted barn where folks inside are having a lively hoedown.” But some of these traditional readings lead to familiar problems found in this genre, as with the lesson Cunningham learned from his diabetes diagnosis: “The Lord took my diabetes curse and turned it into a blessing. Look for His blessing in every situation. Our God is good.” (A natural question is of course why would a benevolent God allow such a diagnosis—or create diabetes in the first place.) But the simple and direct faith outlined in these pungent meditations smooths out such doctrinal qualms and molds the guide’s narrative into a generally heartwarming portrait of religious devotion.
A forthright and affecting series of autobiographical sketches of Christian life.Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73224-880-9
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Ashland Park Books
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
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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