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CHILDREN OF THE MANSE

A touching story of hope, courage, generosity and the resiliency of children.

In the 1940s, one family adopts four abandoned siblings in this true and tender recollection written by the eldest son.

When a health issue triggers a search for their biological family’s medical history, the author and his sister, now middle-aged, sift through a bureaucratic haystack of adoption records and letters from the county home where they, and their two siblings, had spent two grim years. Even before that lowly stretch in the county’s care, the Luchs children had a chaotic home life with their alcoholic father—a petty criminal who, after serving time in prison, disappeared from their lives—and their unstable mother, who frequently abandoned them. But enter a compassionate social worker who, at young Luchs’ insistence, promised to keep the children together and found a loving and well-educated Presbyterian minister and his wife who unflinchingly welcomed all four into their comfortable home. Descriptive details abound, bringing the book to life through its many charming stories, usually involving Janey, the youngest of the family. As the eldest, the author has a keener memory of the neglect and abuses that he and his siblings endured, and, thus, bears the deepest scars. While cherishing the handful of happy times he had with his biological father, Luchs recounts his conflicted feelings for the man, and that Luchs forlornly held out hope that he would see him again. The author does an admirable job of examining the complex emotions he has toward his biological and adoptive parents and describes his struggle to fully embrace his adoptive parents and relinquish his role as surrogate parent to his siblings. This well-written, honest book would be best suited for those who have an interest in the adoption system of the past, or for those who enjoy the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

A touching story of hope, courage, generosity and the resiliency of children.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2011

ISBN: 978-0578035239

Page Count: 306

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: March 10, 2011

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IN MY PLACE

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

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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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