A sweet, wide-eyed, feel-good account about a family friend.
A debut memoir tells the story of a disabled friend who taught the author valuable life lessons.
In the late 1960s, Wiand’s family, which included seven children, moved to Carson City, Michigan, where the kids hoped to make new friends. Enter Eddie Lee—a good-natured, 15-year-old boy with developmental disabilities—who showed up at their door clutching a fistful of peacock feathers. This unique welcome turned into an enduring friendship, and the fun-filled adventures of Eddie became legendary in the author’s family. Affectionately dubbed “Fast Eddie” for the way he zoomed around town on his bicycle, he hadn’t always been so happy. He had been neglected as a baby, and starvation caused permanent brain damage and near blindness in one eye. Thankfully, a loving woman named Tilly convinced her husband that they should adopt him. Tilly taught Eddie how to ride a bike. He started riding it all over town, meeting new friends, collecting bottles to sell, and working odd jobs. And even though he was often bullied, Eddie managed to find joy in life. After growing up, Eddie and Wiand lost touch for more than 30 years, but then they reconnected in 2009. Elderly Tilly had been institutionalized, and Eddie was living with unscrupulous caregivers in horrible conditions. Not to worry—much like Fast Eddie, this often poignant account remains optimistic. Ten brisk chapters offer compelling Eddie anecdotes along with accompanying life lessons. For example, Chapter 6, “Treasure Everything,” tenderly describes how Eddie always had a pocket full of surprises—like arrowheads or a lucky rabbit’s foot—he’d found while neighborhood scavenging. Wiand urges readers to remember that real treasures don’t involve money. There’s some humor here, too. Chapter 2, “Believe In Yourself,” details how Eddie—despite the doubts of others—expertly drove the kids home from a lake after Grandpa got too drunk to handle the task. Regardless of the situation, Eddie’s a memorable guy, and—like curling up on the couch while eating ice cream and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie—this smooth-flowing, heartwarming memoir is comforting.
A sweet, wide-eyed, feel-good account about a family friend.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980223-0-7
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Carlysle & Lloyd Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 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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