An engaging success story that’s steeped in Korean history.
Debut memoirist Choi recounts a memorable journey from poverty in war-torn Korea to entrepreneurial success in the United States.
The author was born in China in 1942, but raised in Seoul during a time of extraordinary political unrest. He was only 8 years old when the Korean War erupted, cleaving the nation in half. The same year, his father, Choi Hyungwoo—an activist, author, and journalist who had once agitated for Korean independence from Japan with future North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung—was arrested and never seen by his family again; the family thought that he might have been taken to North Korea and executed, but they weren’t certain. The author’s mother, Yoo Taejung, struggled to care for Choi and his siblings on her own, and fled Seoul with them due to fear for their safety. The author movingly documents his relentless drive for success, noting how he earned a degree in political science from Korea University, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1969, on a quest for new opportunities, and finally started his export company, K-C International. He achieved impressive things against considerable odds, both as a businessman and as a family man; he married his wife, Hahn Myungki, whom he calls his “soulmate,” in Portland, fathered three daughters, and eventually brought his mother and sister to the United States, as well. In 1993, the North Korean government officially invited the family to Pyongyang, where they met two long-lost half brothers. Choi dined with Kim Il Sung himself, but was largely soured by his experience; he was also appalled by the combination of political oppression and poverty in the country: “As a Korean descendant, I could not bear to witness the peculiar and horrifying phenomena of North Korea’s system of government.” The author’s life is cinematically dramatic, and his accomplishments come off as all the more admirable, given his tone of humility in this memoir. His prose is clear and unembellished, but his story is powerful enough to be inspiring without any poetical adornment. Overall, Choi’s work seamlessly combines astute political commentary with a stirring remembrance of his own personal triumphs.
An engaging success story that’s steeped in Korean history.Pub Date: July 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-48376-4
Page Count: 338
Publisher: EdgeWise Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 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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