A sobering and ultimately effective personal manifesto for changing American child custody procedures.
A memoir offers a case for altering how U.S. courts view single fathers.
The latest book from McDowell (The Tools You Need to Be Successful, 2010), a mixture of personal anecdotes and social study, examines the world of single fathers in American society and in the U.S. legal system. Both are heavily freighted in favor of mothers in any kind of custody disagreement. The author takes up the cause of the “accidental dad,” single fathers caught up in a legal bureaucracy that seldom looks on them with sympathy and, in an overwhelming number of cases, ignores their claims for caregiving or even simple access to their own children. McDowell, himself the child of a fatherless home after the death of his dad, spent seven years battling in court to gain custody of his son, and his book recounts his turmoil and triumphs with a great deal of pathos. He buttresses his account with some statistics about the legal system’s bias against fathers, but he’s also willing to indulge in melodrama to heighten his point, portraying Missy, the mother of his son, as the manipulative and vengeful villain of the story. The purpose of his book, he writes, is to help fathers who are seeking to “gain or improve” their custody arrangements. He admits that many aspects of his tale aren’t encouraging; his own situation, filled equally with good intentions and a criminal record, often functions as a worst-case scenario. The powerful book is unsentimentally straightforward (“When my son was younger, I refused to marry his mom, so she automatically got custody,” he writes at one point. “What’s wrong with this picture?”). But it’s simultaneously very successful in engaging the reader’s emotions as the narrative follows McDowell through the dramatic twists and turns in his quest to gain full custody of his son. This heartfelt emotional content is supplemented by hard-won practical advice on navigating the U.S. court system.
A sobering and ultimately effective personal manifesto for changing American child custody procedures.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5069-0126-8
Page Count: 170
Publisher: First Edition Design Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2016
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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