An often thoughtful meditation on race in America.
A debut memoir reflects back on an African-American man’s lifelong grappling with others’ racist hatred.
Cooper grew up in rural Alabama. From a very young age, he was keenly aware of ferocious prejudice; in 1963, when he was only 10 years old, a Baptist church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four young girls. The author’s father angrily insisted that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shared some of the blame, due to his agitation—a sentiment that some other African-Americans shared. Cooper writes of suffering under the tyranny of his father, who beat him and his mother regularly, he says. The author decided to attend a largely white high school, despite its considerable distance, only to be confronted by ubiquitous racism there: “It astounds me the way in which Jim Crow touched every single area of black life in Birmingham when I was growing up,” he says. Later, Cooper was attracted to Catholicism, which seemed more emotionally restrained than the Baptist tradition in which he was raised, and he decided to pursue the priesthood. However, he says that in seminary he again encountered prejudice, as well as what he characterizes as “drinking, blatant homosexuality and petty bickering.” The author eventually joined the Washington Concert Singers and the National Choral Society and was given the opportunity to travel to Jerusalem, a transformative event in his life. He would return there many times for extended trips, and he considered Israel a refuge from his troubles. Cooper eventually took a low-level job as a reporter at The Washington Post; there, he was able to contribute articles on controversial subjects, such as the role of African-American people during the Holocaust. Cooper’s life, as depicted in this memoir, was filled with daunting challenges, and it will be impossible for readers not to be inspired by his dogged perseverance in the face of adversity. Sometimes, however, the endless catalog of travails can also be exhausting. The author is at his best when discussing the racial tinderbox that was the Deep South during his upbringing, and he intelligently reflects on the many ways that the legacy of slavery continued to haunt the region, long after it was abolished. Overall, this is not a light read, but readers’ patience will be rewarded by its considerable insight.
An often thoughtful meditation on race in America.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76431-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
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
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