A memorable, rewarding family saga of familial love and unbridled determination.
Lieberman’s (Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part One, 2017) autobiography continues with this second installment, which resumes her story just after her schizophrenic mother’s passing.
Near the start of this book, the author eloquently equates her mother’s death to “an amputation that left behind a phantom limb still sending alarm signals to my brain.” The event also gave the author a new perspective on her own fate and “definitely made me eager to start my life over.” With remarkable recollection, she retraces her own life after her mother became a memory, unhurriedly recounting decades of devoted child-rearing and pet raising and the joys and struggles of her career and family life. When her own daughter moved away to college, she reconsidered the surgery that prevented her from having further pregnancies, despite her husband’s initial objections. She reversed the procedure and had a son, Eben, in 1983, 20 years after the birth of her first child, Olivia. A struggle against breast cancer clouded her mid-40s, but she managed to start a preschool and experienced great improvement after treatment with an experimental drug. She endured an unforeseen remission in 1992, which reframed her life once more. Later, she went on to care for her mother-in-law in Florida. The daily foibles and adventures of the author and her mother-in-law in these later pages add some welcome levity and humor to this impassioned autobiography and demonstrate the author’s talent for zesty prose before the predication of her own declining health takes over the book’s concluding chapters. Still, as readers may expect after the last volume, Lieberman effectively shows how her abiding spirit delivers her from death’s door again and again. Although the sunny skies in this remembrance often seem to be few and far between, readers will still get immense satisfaction from knowing that Lieberman made it through—and that she has happiness, love, and precious children to show for it. As in her first installment, the author generously supplies family photographs that greatly embellish and enhance her moving chronicle of motherhood.
A memorable, rewarding family saga of familial love and unbridled determination.Pub Date: July 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9987690-2-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Camperdown Elm Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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