Hikers may find it useful. Medieval scholars will scowl.
Where 14th-century English pilgrims once trod, an Alabama outdoorsman finds hotels, convenience stores, and plenty of other things that remind him—remarkably—of Chaucer.
Ellis has a knack for retracing famous journeys. He’s followed the Trail of Tears (Walking the Trail, 1991), ridden the path of the Pony Express (Bareback!, 1993), and shadowed Sherman to the sea (Marching Through Georgia, 1995). His most recent trek appeals to a sense of spirituality, a topic he tackles by linking the modern British landscape to the lives of the pilgrims who once walked to Becket’s shrine. The author’s trip, like the pilgrims’, takes seven days, each organized around a figure from The Canterbury Tales. Like Chaucer, Ellis comes across shopkeepers, gardeners, and religious folk. Some of them resemble characters in the Tales, but others do not, and readers may well feel the connections are weak. One can sympathize with Ellis when he describes the liberation he feels while traveling and how that freedom may translate into spiritual experience, but his asides relating his own hat to that of a pilgrim in the Middle Ages strain credulity, scallop shell or not. (Pilgrims, writes Ellis, wore scallops to display their piousness.) Moreover, it seems a strange oversight that a writer who constantly references his love of the wilderness and his Cherokee ancestry has very little negative to say about the fact that the forests and wolves that were the mainstay of a Chaucerian pilgrimage are now gone, replaced by pavement, towns, and tamed woods. Instead of using the past as a reference point from which to judge the present, Ellis spends a lot of time talking about how oddly and quaintly pilgrims lived. He doesn’t dwell on what’s been lost, even when he reaches his destination and finds a tourist trap.
Hikers may find it useful. Medieval scholars will scowl.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44706-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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