It’s not perfect, but this poignant memoir will motivate even the most disenchanted reader.
Despite a troubled childhood, numerous career setbacks and a life-threatening health problem, a determined woman never gives up in this inspiring memoir.
From the outside it appears that Ginac and her husband Frank are living the American Dream—they live in a million-dollar home in Austin, Texas, have high-paying careers that afford them every luxury and have a much loved 5-year-old son. But shortly after Frank unexpectedly leaves his job, Linda is shocked to learn that she’s a casualty of massive layoffs, and so starts the long struggle for Linda and Frank to re-establish stability in their usually idyllic world. As the Ginac family tries to rebuild their life during one of the worst economic downturns imaginable, Linda recovers from a miscarriage, builds a new business from the ground up and defeats breast cancer. As she overcomes each obstacle, Linda realizes that her husband is truly her biggest supporter and that with him by her side she can conquer anything life throws at her. Ginac’s memoir is brutally honest and remarkably inspiring. While some will find much of the author’s interminable detail unnecessary and occasionally tedious, Ginac’s sincerity makes up for her deliberate style. The author’s penchant for spending money and her admitted lack of frugality will not resonate well with some readers, especially those who are still experiencing the worst that the current economy has to offer. But those who can look past Ginac’s shortcomings will find themselves awed by her candor and vulnerability. The author does not gloss over her often unrealistic expectations of her husband, nor does she sugarcoat her imperfect marriage. Instead, she portrays her struggles in a way that allows readers to sympathize with and relate to her. Readers who pick up this book will find their inadequacies and insecurities reflected in Ginac, and will ultimately be moved by her determination to succeed.
It’s not perfect, but this poignant memoir will motivate even the most disenchanted reader.Pub Date: June 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983456100
Page Count: 270
Publisher: The Ginac Group
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
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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