A stimulating, personal work about self-actualization in the wake of tragedy.
In this memoir and spiritual self-help book, a woman whose husband died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center tells of finding healing and inspiration.
In 2001, debut author Luckett and her husband, Teddy, were a couple in their early 40s with three young children, living in suburban New Jersey. Teddy commuted into Manhattan every day, working long hours at a high-pressure job on Wall Street to support his family, and Lisa was a stay-at-home mom. In this remembrance, she says that she felt that she was “drowning” in the isolation and constant stress of caring for an infant, a 4-year-old, and a 7-year-old. Although deeply in love with her husband, she says that she dealt with feelings of resentment, due to the frustrations of her current life and the pain and alienation of growing up with an alcoholic father and a narcissistic mother. Then Teddy became a victim of the disastrous events in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. At first overwhelmed by grief and anger, Luckett soon discovered another side to the trauma, which she dubbed the “Godness of 9/11”—a powerful spirit of human compassion and resilience. Buoyed by the “kindness of strangers,” as well as the help of two skilled therapists, she gradually learned how to help her family navigate the tragedy and find a new strength, joy, and positive direction in life. Luckett’s narrative skillfully weaves together events from different eras to present a vivid portrait of one American middle-class family’s life during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. She also delves into how pain and struggle can be hidden beneath a placid, public exterior. Luckett effectively uses her experience as a 9/11 widow to show how she left her victimhood and insecurity behind in order to make the most of the rest of her life. Her own choice to undergo four years of psychoanalysis may not be within some readers’ reach, but they’ll still find her unblinking self-exploration and honest evaluation of her life and choices to be compelling and heartening.
A stimulating, personal work about self-actualization in the wake of tragedy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73219-710-7
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Cozmeena Enlightened Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2018
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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