A smart memoir, wrapped inside an overly didactic advice book.
Herbert's (Creating the AHRC, 2008) latest book—half epistolary memoir, half advice guide— tells young adults why they should be serious about their work.
“I had often professed that a liberal education was good preparation for life,” the author writes in the book’s opening letter. “My worklife ended up testing that traditional guidance.” He then puts his education to good use, penning a total of 25 letters to “Jonah,” a stand-in for all young people who are gearing up to enter the adult workplace. The letters touch on issues of philosophy, history and psychology, while also recounting anecdotes about Herbert’s life as a working stiff and his struggle to make a difference in an indifferent world. The autobiographical fragments manage to be both sobering in their depiction of cold bureaucratic work and inspirational in their optimism in the face of adversity. Herbert notes that he takes his inspiration from Swiss film director Alain Tanner’s 1976 classic, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, about youth in the aftermath of the social upheavals of the late ’60s. He quotes a line from the film: “In twenty-five years the century will spit him out….That’s the time left for us to help him get off the shit-pile.” The author takes the same admirable stance—that older generations have an obligation to make the world better for younger ones. However, the book does become repetitive, reminding readers again and again about how harsh and heedless the adult world can be. This isn’t particularly surprising or insightful advice, especially considering that the world of the young can also be harsh and heedless, and some readers may feel it to be condescending. Overall, the book might have benefited from a less heavy-handed approach. But when the gloom and doom are wiped away, one finds a remarkably beautiful book underneath. Perhaps if Herbert had concentrated his efforts into a narrative form, he could have achieved his noble goals more effectively.
A smart memoir, wrapped inside an overly didactic advice book.Pub Date: May 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615948560
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Agora Associates of Metropolitan Washington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
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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