A thoughtful and amusing look at a troubled nation’s soul.
A series of comic vignettes plumbs the cultural condition of contemporary Greece.
Economically embattled, Greece is typically portrayed as a nation of hapless victims or adolescent derelicts. Debut author Paradias assembles a series of character portraits of the troubled modern nation with an ancient past that transcends that binary narrative. The political and fiscal dysfunction of the country is either a symptom or catalyst of extraordinary eccentricity; the author builds his short remembrances around colorfully quirky types. For example, Mister Shiftless solicited help building a special “orgone accumulator”—essentially a box filled with semiprecious stones—that he believed would cure his cancer after he’d masturbated within it. Mister Crawley was a devoted father and a disciple of Satan. Shady Senior tried to sell Paradias a house riddled with bullet holes. Sgt. Cynic casually explained how to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Greek military. Father Woe was a priest his whole adult life, an experience that left him an atheist. The author also discusses some peculiar cultural aspects of Greek life, including its ambivalence about sexual education, its relationship with superstition and sorcery, and the way marketing pamphlets promising a better life express a paradoxical combination of popular discontent and resilient hopefulness. Paradias doesn’t try to provide much by way of concrete political analysis or policy recommendations—he does briefly lament the proliferation of leftists in government and the unwieldy size of the public sector. But this study is meant as a portal into the Greek ethos itself, not a white paper on its macroeconomic floundering. Paradias’ tableaux are consistently offbeat and often very funny, even more so if the stories are free of artistic embellishment, as he insists they are. Sometimes he fails to clearly draw the connection between the outlandish behavior and Greek society—surely other nations are whimsically kooky as well. Overall, though, he provides a welcome counterpoint to an increasingly stale debate about the future of Greece. The author’s final appraisal isn’t bleak—Greece has suffered much in its long history and has survived—but it isn’t cheery either: “Nothing too fundamental is going to change. Every single thing written in this book, all the aching and the weirdness and the sex and the death, they’re going to still be around, reminding us of our humanity.”
A thoughtful and amusing look at a troubled nation’s soul.Pub Date: April 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946335-07-4
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Rooster Republic Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
