Delivers some tense moments but never fulfills its initial promise.
An immersion journalist’s ill-conceived quest to illegally cross the Mexican border into the United States.
Although the banal title fails to capture the inherent danger of the task, former Army infantryman and Penthouse contributor Rico (Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America, 2007) spends the first few chapters prepping the reader for hair-raising adventure. With the guidance of “coyotes”—mercenary guides who help illegal aliens cross the border—the author planned to put himself at risk and cross the border in the same covert, desperate fashion that hundreds of Mexicans attempt every day. Initially presented as a gesture of empathy for the poor souls trying to escape poverty-ridden Mexico, Rico’s quest never quite transcends narcissistic stunt journalism. The author orchestrates a dramatic buildup to his undertaking with foreboding stories of northern Mexico’s notorious Devil’s Highway and the deadly Los Zetas paramilitary group. But as Rico and his battered rental car sped along the U.S.-Mexico border to find an ideal illegal entry point, his biggest nemeses were curious cops and nosy border patrolmen. However, the author does offer objective profiles of the “Minutemen” near San Diego—vigilante civilian border patrollers with their own primitive means of curtailing illegal immigration. In Juarez, Rico made compelling notes of the city’s desperate poverty and the important ways in which it differs from sister city El Paso, Texas, but he’s self-conscious among the American aid workers—privileged college graduates who shucked their expensive degrees to help the poor—and betrays a hint of jealousy and contempt for these slumming do-gooders. Finally, after paranoia-induced acid flashbacks, constant hassles from the authorities and nonstop driving, Rico’s project began to take its toll. His final stab at crossing the border is unforgivably lame compared to the grand Lawrence of Arabia–style adventure he envisioned.
Delivers some tense moments but never fulfills its initial promise.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50383-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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