A strong addition, unobtrusively narrated, to a well-covered subject.
A thorough and lively history of America’s first family during WWII.
For the Kennedys, the years leading up to and during the second world war were formative—such is the theme that guides Renehan (The Lion’s Pride, 1998, etc.) in his ably crafted history of the operatic family. He focuses most of his attention on the Kennedy men, specifically Joe, Joe Jr., and “Jack,” although he does give mention to younger siblings—and some time is spent on Kathleen. But it’s the father and his heirs that drive Renehan’s narrative. Joseph Kennedy, family patriarch, sought to turn his wealth into political power. Appointed American Ambassador to England in return for years of Democratic loyalty and fundraising, Kennedy Sr. saw the office as an opportunity to gain the social acceptance that snobby Protestant powers at home had denied him. Ambassador Kennedy felt he had arrived, and attention from the press made him bold. He allowed himself to flirt with the idea of running for president, while Roosevelt—who understood Kennedy well—made sure he didn’t cause trouble. Kennedy’s stance on the war soon made him irrelevant. At the Court of St. James, he harped on the inevitability of British defeat and counseled that Hitler be appeased no matter the cost. Neither message went over well, and Kennedy soon bitterly found himself at home, unemployed and out of touch. Meanwhile, Joe Jr. lived with the burden of his father’s expectations. Competitive and intellectually clumsy, Joe Jr. struggled to grow into the man he and his father wanted him to be. Harvard and Harvard Law were struggles, his stints in England made him appear clumsily American, and his efforts at advancement in war were forced and ultimately deadly. Jack, on the other hand, contrasted his brother’s effort with ease. The grace that would later mark his presidency was evident in his youth. Despite chronically poor health, everything seemed to come easy to the second son. School passed effortlessly—his thesis was published to acclaim—and heroism, when it came, fit him well.
A strong addition, unobtrusively narrated, to a well-covered subject.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50165-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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