A beautifully written consideration of the relation between home and personal identity.
A memoir chronicles a writer’s return to the ranch where she was raised.
Hasselstrom (No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life, 2010) largely grew up on a ranch in South Dakota, a slice of bucolic prairie land she left to pursue an education but returned to repeatedly. After her first marriage collapsed under the weight of her husband’s serial infidelities, she moved back to recover and, later, built a home on the property and lived there with her second husband, George. She still resides there with her new husband, Jerry—George tragically died from Hodgkin’s disease. The author’s remembrance is a catalog of journal entries covering one year broken into 12 chapters—each one representing a month of recollections. Hasselstrom interrogates her past with the scrupulousness of an investigative journalist, mining the family’s archival records—her mother’s and father’s journals and grandmother’s letters figure centrally—in order to understand her own place in the world. She wrestles to fully comprehend the bitterness her father experienced as a result not only of endless toil, but also debilitating health problems and the consequences of her mother’s bout with mental illness. The cynosure of the account, though, is her attachment to a ranch that is her family’s bequest, a parcel of land with an uncertain future: “I move through my days accompanied by thoughts of those who worked the land here before me, the people who are responsible for my being here. They will all be part of whatever decision I make about the future of this place.” Hasselstrom’s prose evocatively depicts the splendor of her natural environs and the way its beauty is complicated by attached memories not always sanguine. Her reflections are searching and elegantly meditative and traverse a broad swath of territory, including authorial creativity, cattle, and love. Since this is a diary kept daily, a good deal of space is reserved for documenting the quotidian: the weather, what the author prepared for lunch, and the kinds of work clothes she prefers. This content is unlikely to grab most readers.
A beautifully written consideration of the relation between home and personal identity.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937147-12-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: High Plains Pr
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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