Zacharias shows a keen eye for detail (she’s also a photographer), a strong sense of place, and an ambivalent, unsentimental...
A novelist and professor’s essay collection that almost coalesces into a memoir.
Zacharias (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro; At Random, 2013, etc.) recounts how, after the publication of her first novel (Lessons, 1981), she spent 10 years writing her second, only to see it rejected, as was her third. “You write well, but you won’t sell,” editors and agents told her. “Today’s reader wants a high concept plot and an upbeat message. Your work is literary. It’s dark, but not Oprah dark. There’s no market.” Though the author didn’t exactly buy the explanation, she does write well, and she has since found a home in literary journals. The chronological continuity here and the thematic interweaving of family, place, art and mortality give this collection a cohesiveness that makes some of the lesser pieces—e.g., “Geography for Writers,” which mainly catalogs the spaces where various writers have written—seem intrusive. Yet the format also undermines the strength of some of the strongest pieces, such as the collection-closing “Buzzards,” in which her memories of her father’s life and suicide would have more climactic power if she hadn’t already shared these with readers in earlier essays. “A Grand Canyon” finds the writer working on many levels, as she fulfills her mother’s dream to travel there, a trip that reveals an emotional chasm between her teenage son and his grandmother and presages “the heartbreaking canyon that will open between us, because in that part of the story the generation gap isn’t between my mother and son but between my son and me. One day the love affair ends for the child, though it never does for the parent.” And then there’s the canyon itself, which the author illuminates as more than a metaphor.
Zacharias shows a keen eye for detail (she’s also a photographer), a strong sense of place, and an ambivalent, unsentimental examination of blood ties and family legacy.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938235-00-9
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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