A cancer survivor’s affecting and elegantly composed remembrance.
A woman recollects her frightening confrontation with leukemia and the ways in which it changed her outlook on life.
Debut author Lee was born in 1962 on the far-flung island of Guam in the Pacific; as a result, her happy childhood was largely insulated from the political tumult and cultural upheaval that engulfed the U.S. mainland. Her upbringing was far from common, though—she was raised in a classic pagoda-style home, a 24,000-square-foot “fortress” that housed a large multigenerational clan that included her parents, six siblings, grandparents, and extended family. In addition, the head of the clan, her grandfather, was a successful businessman who openly kept a second wife and family in China. The horizons of the author’s unusual, if cloistered, childhood were expanded when she spent summers in Manila and San Francisco—the latter became her “Shangri-La,” an idealized representation of freedom and sophistication, and she eventually moved there to attend college. But Lee’s world was shattered by a sudden illness—in 1988, she become increasingly sick and then suffered a stroke. She eventually learned she was suffering from leukemia and could only be saved by a combination of radiation, chemotherapy, and a bone marrow transplant, which would prevent her from having children should she survive. The author, writing in deeply introspective prose, astutely examines the ways in which the disease compelled a revision of her worldview, puncturing the illusions of her youth. She turned to her family, especially her mother, for consolation amid her trials, a dependence she writes of affectingly: “I am also certain that if I had died, the mere sound of my mother’s voice would have sustained and guided me through whatever stages were ahead. The strength and power in her words would have been a beacon.” Lee’s story is a poignantly inspirational one—after her recovery, she became a patient advocate, intent on helping others. Her memoir is notably forthcoming and meditatively sensitive—with a gimlet-eye, she limns both tragedy and her triumph over it to find a meaning that encompasses both.
A cancer survivor’s affecting and elegantly composed remembrance.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-14242-4
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Pisces Press San Francisco
Review Posted Online: March 7, 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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