A heartfelt, engaging account of how an adventurous bike trip rejuvenated a relationship.
A debut memoir examines self-discovery and marriage—through a bicycle trek around the world.
The problem that opens Rosen’s book was that while she still loved her husband, Mike, she found that she was no longer “in love” with him. “We had become acquaintances instead of lovers,” she admits of their marriage. The two met early in life—at age 18—and were on the brink of divorce when the outdoorsy author proposed a globe-trotting expedition on bikes to rekindle their struggling relationship. After 11 years together, they embarked on an ambitious cycling trip that took them from the Mojave Desert to New Zealand and Tibet. After renting their Winnipeg home, getting the appropriate shots, spending hours researching bikes and racks, and—finally—quitting their jobs, they began their journey, starting in the “golden prairie of Manitoba.” Initially, the couple’s strained relationship took center stage. Where Rosen was daring and committed to outdoor pursuits, Mike was staid and generally more interested in watching television. At first, the pair’s “bike-fixing skills” were rather limited: “But we could both now patch a tube and lube our chains. The rest, like our relationship, we figured we would learn as we travelled.” The trip became a metaphor for their relationship and a chance for the author to pursue a “new way of life” while “focusing on being happy in the moment.” Along the way, they sampled local customs (such as a high school football game in Overton, Nevada) and suffered dog attacks and flat tires. Rosen’s work is satisfying both as an intriguing memoir and vivid travelogue. In Colorado, the couple skinny-dipped in a hot springs. And in Vietnam, they visited the site of the My Lai Massacre: “We knelt at gravesites beneath the Bodhi trees in the empty village.” The author offers thoughtful descriptions of local scenery—in Ouray, Colorado, “the wind kissed the tops of white-barked aspens”—and heartfelt discussions of interpersonal dramas. At more than 300 pages, the book is probably longer than it needs to be, but Rosen and her husband make for enjoyable company throughout.
A heartfelt, engaging account of how an adventurous bike trip rejuvenated a relationship.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77160-315-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 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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