by Joy Ruth Mickelson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2016
A moving work of memory—focusing on two sisters’ wartime struggles—that helps bridge the wide gulf between childhood and...
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A woman looks back on growing up in foster homes in England during World War II.
In this memoir, Mickelson (Our Sons Were Labeled Behavior Disordered: Here Is the Story of Our Lives, 2000) recounts her childhood. Born to a working-class Jewish couple in London, she and her sister, Viv, were moved to the countryside with other children to avoid German bombing. The sisters encountered kindness but also cruelty and anti-Semitism in their foster homes. Their first stay, with a good-natured vicar and his wife, ended abruptly when the vicar suffered a stroke. After spending six weeks across the street in the overcrowded Short residence, the girls moved to another foster home but had to leave when Mickelson contracted scarlet fever. Placed with a couple named the Canns, the sisters were treated like family members until one day they discovered Ma Cann dead in bed. Frightened by their next set of elderly foster parents, they ran away. After their billeting officer caught up with them, they stayed with a family whose mother hit and yelled at them, hollering, “That’s enough, you little kike!” at Mickelson when she wouldn’t eat bubble and squeak that “smelt like manure.” Following her expulsion from school, Viv returned to her parents. Mickelson eventually followed. But the sisters reunited only to have their mother die suddenly. Pondering anti-Semitism and their faith, Viv concluded: “Accept the fact that you’re a Jew and that everyone hates you.” Mickelson has written a stirring account of her childhood. The book is especially poignant because it’s written from the viewpoint of a child who can’t understand the purportedly rational adult world and grown-ups’ conceits and prejudices. The author’s particularly adept at description, whether reminiscing about eating wild mushrooms that “smelled of the fields and the sun” or the many characters who people this memoir, such as her sex-starved spinster Aunt Mimi, who wore a see-through pink organdy skirt, made lascivious remarks about the men around her, and ended up in a psychiatric facility. Capturing the quirks, kindness, and cruelty of her foster families, Mickelson delivers a sadly realistic personal account of life in England during the war and of the anti-Semitism that pervaded that country even as it fought Nazi Germany.
A moving work of memory—focusing on two sisters’ wartime struggles—that helps bridge the wide gulf between childhood and adulthood.Pub Date: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9891634-7-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: FYD Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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