Exemplary travel-writing marred by less-than-enthralling ventures into the self’s interior.
A luminously written, thoughtful account of a solo crossing of Papua New Guinea is also an uneasy mix of exorcism and exploration as a young writer wrestles with old anxieties while facing new challenges.
Though belonging to that contemporary genre of travel-writing in which self-absorption and naïveté often predominate, Salak’s story offers vivid and informative commentary as it describes a region whose interior was only first explored in the 1930s. New Guinea is still a place where cannibalism is rumored to be practiced—she visits a village of “Christian cannibals” in which women still wear grass skirts and the numerous tribes engage in blood feuds. Towns like Port Moresby, however, suffer from the usual Third World ills as gangs of unemployed men, the notorious “rascals,” regularly rape, steal, and generally run amok. As she describes her voyage up the Fly River, she visits a refugee camp for New Guineans who have fled the brutal depredations of the Indonesian army in neighboring Irian Jaya and talks to Pastor Carl, who wants her to tell the world what his people have suffered; stays with the occasional missionary family, who maintain typical suburban lifestyles in the middle of the jungle; and then after crossing the mountainous divide, rafts down the Sepik River on a leaky contraption made from canoes to revisit her past. Her childhood was unhappy: her atheist parents believed in self-reliance, and not love; she was shy and unsure of herself and thought travel would help her conquer her fears. Before setting out for New Guinea, she had traveled in Asia and East Africa, where in 1992 she was nearly raped as she journeyed through the war zone of Mozambique to Zimbabwe. But these physical tests of the spirit, as she comes to understand near the end of her journey, cannot offer the salvation she craves. It has to come from within, and she suggests that in New Guinea she learned “self acceptance—contentment.”
Exemplary travel-writing marred by less-than-enthralling ventures into the self’s interior.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-165-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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