A skillfully crafted war story that’s both touching and historically captivating.
A son’s debut biography focuses on his father’s service as a World War II pilot.
Donald N. Evans was born and raised in a small town in Utah, the son of a farmer. His father descended from a long line of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who originally settled rural Lehi. Don was a prodigiously talented athlete—he was an all-state high school player in both basketball and football and a member of the varsity tennis team at Brigham Young University. Don was deeply in love with his high school sweetheart, Laura Jeanne, but on the other side of the Atlantic, war was ravaging Europe. In anticipation of the draft and stirred by patriotic duty, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Two months later, Don was called to duty and would eventually serve as a pilot in France and Belgium, stationed in Normandy, Chartres, Laon, and Chièvres. Author Kenneth D. Evans, Don’s son, stitched together this loving biography from sundry sources. They included his father’s brief memoir of the war, hundreds of love letters exchanged between Don and Laura Jeanne, and public records that the author scrupulously examined. Don’s eventful experiences overseas climaxed in terror—he was shot down over the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, captured by enemy soldiers, and forced to march more than 200 miles under the most grueling conditions to a prisoner of war camp. He was subjected to days of intense interrogations, and back at home, Laura Jeanne was roiled by an official letter acknowledging that he was missing in action. The author impressively pulls off what is generally considered rare—a historically rigorous portrait of a subject for whom the writer harbors infinite affection. He also includes an endearingly intimate account of his own motivations: to fill in the gaps left by his father’s reticence regarding the war and fully understand the man he came to appreciate as a hero. Wisely, he lets Don tell his own story when he can: “I thought about the mess I was in, and wondered how I’d ever get out of it. Mostly, though, I thought about Laura Jeanne and Christmas Eve back home—wondering if we’d ever see another Christmas together.”
A skillfully crafted war story that’s both touching and historically captivating.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7323702-0-3
Page Count: 501
Publisher: Starhaven Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 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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