In this light and enjoyable collection of previously published essays, the peripatetic Millman visits some of the more remote precincts on the planet and reports on encounters both exotic and bizarre. Since Millman (who writes for National Geographic and other magazines) likes to go where others haven—t been or don—t want to go, most of his writings here originate from far-flung islands. Thus, he describes the slow-paced life of Tonga islanders, with a copy of Maugham in hand explores the Bandan spice islands, tours ancient ruins and imbibes a potent brew with the natives in Micronesia, and is attacked by one of the island’s ghosts in Western Samoa. Some of Millman’s better episodes take place on lesser-known islands off North America, including the forest-clad, lightly populated Anticosti in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia, and Honduras’s English-speaking Bay Islands. Islands or not, some places from which Millman reports lie entirely off the tourist map. Abjuring seal eye, he dines on boiled walrus and seal brisket with Eskimos north of Hudson Bay; holds an incredibly unpronounceable conversation with the aid of an Inuit dictionary on a kayak stopover on the Labrador coast; and in the most memorable pieces accidentally invites himself to dinner at the home of an impoverished Ecuadoran. The eponymous adventure into the depths of the Ecuadoran Amazon, in company of an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, has Millman slogging through jungle, jumping away from snakes, being eaten by ants, and finally, at the camp of a medicine man, defending his circumcision. There are other quirky vignettes here such as a trip to the car-less isle of Sark and Millman’s discovery, right on the Massachusetts coast, of the carcass of a rare giant squid. Taken together, this is rather a hodgepodge of experiences that don’t quite fit together, but for the uncritical arm-chair traveler these essays are a nice way to spend an afternoon.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57129-055-9
Page Count: 183
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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