Not every book offers concrete advice, but Donegan’s does. Two pieces of it, for that matter: (1) Never work in a used car...
The used-car lot with funnyman Donegan (No News at Throat Lake, 2000, etc.) and his amusing/depressing take on the business that has come to epitomize sleaze.
“Call me a miserable Scottish git but subconsciously I have long believed that life wasn’t meant to be perfect,” says Donegan, and he acts on that notion by foregoing a Silicon Valley job to sell used cars instead. In what amounts to one anecdote after another about how he amassed the tricks of the trade, he explains to readers how he became an asphalt warrior at Orchard Pre-Owned Autos. Though a long toss from being a car guy, he learns how to pick targets—couples with kids, fat people, Japanese—and scorn the time-wasters: single women and anyone from the subcontinent, China, or Europe. His coworkers offer advice and encouragement: be friendly, don’t be friendly, get rid of the ugly shit, or “selling cars is like fishing.” Donegan has a tendency to press his jokes on his readers much the way salesmen press their lemons on the unsuspecting: “buying a car at Orchard was like having a bit part as a victim in Jaws,” or “she took a test drive at a steady 50 mph, appearing not to notice there was a Metallica concert taking place where the engine should be.” But he also shows some ethics. He abhors the money culture of Silicon Valley and is tempted to explain to a computer executive why he sells cars: “Because it means I don’t have to sit in an office with small-minded, money-obsessed bores like you everyday.” And when, in the end, the phony smiles and petty scams reach critical mass for him, he quits.
Not every book offers concrete advice, but Donegan’s does. Two pieces of it, for that matter: (1) Never work in a used car lot if you cherish your soul, and (2) never buy a used car without a certified mechanic at one elbow and a bunko adviser on the other.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-671-78583-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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