A memoir of a grueling upbringing captures the author’s misery and hope but might have benefited from more robust...
A woman tells of an unstable childhood, an abusive marriage, and years of emotional recovery in this debut memoir.
Aiken-Hall writes that she was born into chaos: as her mother, Wendy, gave birth to her in 1981, police escorted her unstable father, Ralph, from the hospital for harassing a nurse. Due to severe depression, alcohol use, and affairs with cruel men, Aiken-Hall says, her mother couldn’t provide a stable home, and it fell to the author’s maternal grandmother, known as “Gram,” to provide love and comfort. Wendy and Ralph soon resumed their relationship after Aiken-Hall’s birth, she says, but the two split again after Wendy had an affair and Ralph threatened to murder the whole family. The author writes that Wendy then moved in with a new partner who molested her while her mother watched; Ralph, already ill from paranoid schizophrenia and a genetic disorder, died after a construction-related accident. Aiken-Hall struggled with feelings of shame, confusion, and grief, which she says were only endurable due to Gram’s much-needed unconditional love. After a string of failed teenage romances and an emotional affair with a co-worker, Aiken-Hall says that she became ensnared by an abusive man who coerced her into sex and demanded her hand in marriage after she became pregnant. Aiken-Hall had three children with him and weathered the loss of Gram while gradually moving toward change and healing. Aiken-Hall’s insights in this memoir can be striking at times; she writes movingly, for instance, about how she returned to abusive situations because she’d always craved affection, and about her terrifying youthful realization that Gram would inevitably die, depriving her of her only source of love. But readers may wish that there were deeper reflections about her relationships with specific family members. Most prominently, Aiken-Hall’s mother, despite being mentioned in the book’s title, remains an elusive and mostly undefined figure, beyond her parenting failures. As a result, a climactic moment when the author forgives her mother lacks impact.
A memoir of a grueling upbringing captures the author’s misery and hope but might have benefited from more robust examinations of key relationships.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9993656-7-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Moonlit Madness Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2017
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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