Moving selections, somewhat disconnected but gracefully composed.
Gettysburg Review managing editor Kupperman offers discrete, attentive autobiographical essays concerning her relationship with her mother and others in her life.
Undoing the harm of years of enforced silence—“the genesis of omission”—is the author’s aim in these essays about family, travel and love, published separately in literary journals, and as a collection the winner of the 2009 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction. The first part deals with the author’s mother, “Dolores, a prophecy of sorrows,” who died by suicide in 1989. Kupperman admits her mother had always been “foreign” to her—a glamorous presence who had once worked at Revlon and became the wife of a several-times married fundraiser for Jewish philanthropies (Kupperman’s father) in the 1950s. The couple underwent a rancorous custody battle when the author was eight, although it wasn’t until Kupperman’s father was dying in 2004 that he allowed her access to the extensive court files. “Habeas Corpus” delineates the unsavory contents of those files, such as the mother’s neglect of the daughter and entrapment by detectives in an adultery sting, ultimately necessitating both parties’ need to win the girl’s allegiance. In “Teeth in the Wind,” the author layers reflections of her family over different time periods: The “ghosts” riding a coastal wind storm in Maine circa 1995 bring to mind her attempts to locate the story of her paternal grandmother, supposedly from Kiev, who actually hailed from the Pale of Settlement region in western Ukraine before venturing to America after the pogroms of 1905. The Chernobyl nuclear cataclysm kept Kupperman from traveling to Russia, further complicating “the business of remembering.” In “The Perfect Meal,” the author examines her doomed love affair with a married man, and “That Roar on the Other Side of Violence” provides eloquent anecdotes about the battered women who populated a domestic-abuse shelter where the author worked.
Moving selections, somewhat disconnected but gracefully composed.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55597-560-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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