An often entertaining history of a Minnesota farm family.
An account of the author’s family’s history in the American Midwest, starting in the early part of the 20th century.
Debut author Ehlert begins this remembrance with his father’s life in Stearns County in central Minnesota. Melvin George Ehlert was born in 1923, and until 1931 he was commonly known as “Bunny”; this changed at a family dinner when the 7-year-old declared that he would only answer to “Melvin” from that point forward. From there, the reader is given a tour of Melvin’s life, which included plenty of farm work, being rejected for service in World War II due to flat feet, and eventually opening a store and settling down to start a family. The titular Melvin is the focus of the book, but there are also moments from the author’s own life, as he’s Melvin’s oldest child. He was the first sibling to sweep the family store, he says, and he later attended and eventually dropped out of Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, before joining the U.S. Marines in 1967. Throughout the personal accounts are inklings of what was going on in the popular culture of the United States at the time; for example, the author notes that in 1958, when Melvin opened his store, the hula hoop was wildly popular. There’s also a portion of the book devoted to the life of a local celebrity: Nobel Prize–winning author Sinclair Lewis, who was born in the nearby Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885. Regardless of the subject matter, the book maintains a folksy sense of humor throughout. For instance, the author says that when someone once remarked on the delightfulness of Melvin’s many stories, he responded, “But how do you know they’re true?” Such details are relatable and often touching. However, occasional accounts of small-town dramas are less memorable; at one point, Melvin is on the board of directors of a local hospital, and the board, which wanted to attract doctors to the town, discussed the merits of hiring a medical doctor versus a doctor of osteopathy. Neither this discussion nor its conclusion is particularly engaging. Overall, the book shines brightest when keeping things personal.
An often entertaining history of a Minnesota farm family.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945330-20-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Telemachus Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2019
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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