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EVIDENCE OF MY EXISTENCE

The weight of self-regard retards but does not prevent a lovely lift off and stirring journey.

An irascible veteran U.S. News & World Report photographer revisits the mountains and molehills, the dimples and depressions and canyons of his peripatetic life.

Lo Scalzo opens with a self-righteous blast at writers of creative nonfiction and memoir, implying that all are cut from the James Frey cloth. He then proceeds to employ many of the techniques others have pioneered and perfected: compression, flashbacks, “remembered” dialogue from decades ago—but all in increasingly effective fashion. The narrative commences with a breathtaking image of his wife Deirdre asleep in a car in Texas, then progresses to early 2003 and his preparation to cover the imminent “stupid war” in Iraq. But a call from Deirdre brought heartbreaking news: a second miscarriage. He left for the war anyway. Then a leap backward to his 11th birthday and his first camera, a Polaroid. Here and elsewhere, the author fails to sufficiently educate his readers. We learn little about his art or about the art of photography in general. He was late in switching to digital from film in 2001, and he offers some cursory, unremarkable comments about the differences between the two. He endured a rough adolescence, a “profound indifference” to schoolwork and a self-serving moral code. He landed an internship, then a job with U. S. News, making the most of his opportunity (despite a contentious relationship with a new photo editor later on). As the author matures, the narrative accelerates. He traveled the world, shot some compelling, often dangerous photographs (ranging from porn production to global warming to warfare) and gradually realized that his wife and newborn child were as important—no, more important—than his career. Not an unexpected epiphany but an affecting one.

The weight of self-regard retards but does not prevent a lovely lift off and stirring journey.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-8214-1772-0

Page Count: 328

Publisher: Ohio Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007

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IN MY PLACE

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

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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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