An unfailingly optimistic take on the quintessential American success story.
An intriguing, upbeat memoir of an Argentinian doctor coming to America to practice his craft.
When 27-year-old Leo Grieben arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport from his native Buenos Aires in January 1960, he had $215 in his wallet and the promise of a neurosurgery fellowship at Boston’s Lahey Clinic. The move was difficult for the young graduate of the Universidad de Buenos Aires’ medical school, but he willingly joined “the Argentine exodus” because “Argentina, the country I had been born and raised in, was going to the dogs.” He left behind his wife, Blanca, and his children, and decided to assess the situation in Boston by himself first, after a brief stopover in New York where he quickly learned the golden rule of all U.S. travelers: “[W]hen in New York, do what New Yorkers do.” At the Lahey Clinic, and at Boston’s various hotels and boardinghouses, he faced the challenges that confront all immigrants, from difficulties communicating with a thick accent to simply dealing with loneliness. His accounts of letters to and from Argentina are a touching reminder of the days before e-mail. Eventually his family joins him, and the memoir tells the story of his steadily improving medical career, which takes him from Boston to Minnesota, and includes plenty of warm character portraits and well-told anecdotes. One of the book’s most gripping interludes is a nerve-wracking return trip to Argentina, which proves the melancholy dictum that one can’t go home again. At another point, Grieben has a heart attack while on an outing with his family but his medical training allows him to advise his wife on what to do; this and other stories show the author’s keen awareness of the relatively primitive state of medicine in the 1960s. Through it all, however, Grieben never loses his sunny outlook or his puckish sense of humor.
An unfailingly optimistic take on the quintessential American success story.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615800837
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Leo Grieben
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2014
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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