A brief, often delightful remembrance that blooms into a warm tale of frontier life.
A memoir of a teacher in Idaho’s Hells Canyon area in the early 20th century.
Harris, who died in 1979, was an educator-turned-journalist who first published this recollection in 1971. This second edition, edited and republished by Marilyn Allen, the author’s niece, is a welcome reprise. It investigates Harris’ long-standing attachment to a place that offered, in her words, “a rough life with no refinements.” She first arrived in Buck Creek, Idaho, in 1916 for an eight-month stint teaching children. Things were tense from the start, as the 16-year-old author had lied about her age to get a job in the rough-and-tumble frontier. She diligently documents her time at her first outpost, describing a hot-and-cold affair with a local boy with the same wit that she uses to recount her riding a seemingly sick mule into a nearby town. Things became less quaint, however, when she accepted a four-month post teaching at a camp on forest-reserve land. Her new position required her to care for seven kids from Monday to Friday, because the terrain was too harsh for them to regularly travel to and from the school building. She and the children camped out in tents, and their neighbor was a strange, cranky old man with no apparent affection for anything but sugar. In this section, the memoir provides eye-opening insights into the American education system before World War I; the schoolchildren, who belonged to nomadic ranching families, only had four months per year for schooling and hadn’t yet learned to read. Harris, ever the teacher, is always ready to provide readers with historic, economic, and geographic context for the events that she recalls, and these explanations can, at times, be somewhat dry. The dire conditions, however, are the perfect host for Harris’ frank humor, most notably in her account of the final weeks of school, when multiple difficulties befell the young schoolmarm. Joseph’s illustrations of a young Harris frolicking in nature and caring for children only strengthen its charms.
A brief, often delightful remembrance that blooms into a warm tale of frontier life.Pub Date: April 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9565-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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