A beautifully produced travelogue, but one that’s far too long and detailed to have very broad appeal.
The third and final installment of a nautical memoir of a couple’s circumnavigation of the globe.
Hofmann (Sailing the South Pacific, 2012, etc.) and her husband, Gunter, decided to sail around the world in a state-of-the-art, custom-built catamaran, starting in 2000. Their last series of voyages commenced in Australia and circled back to France, where their journey began. Along the way, the couple made memorable stops in Thailand, Singapore, China, and Yemen, among other places; the entire eight-year trip landed them in 62 countries. Many of the troubles they encountered were minor, though understandably exasperating. The author notes that the lack of air-conditioning was oppressive, for example, and she and her husband contended with woeful bureaucratic corruption in Indonesia and Egypt. The couple found themselves at a discomfiting emotional impasse when Gunter suddenly announced that he wanted to abandon the original navigational plan in order to spend as much as another year in Thailand. He was depleted from travel, Hofmann writes, and worried about the wisdom of sailing through Pirate’s Alley, an infamously dangerous stretch of water between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. This is also the most romantic volume of the trilogy, however; the Hofmanns celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary in Australia, which she affectingly describes in these pages. Like its predecessors, this is a heavy tome, adorned with spectacular color photographs, and the author furnishes a surfeit of intriguing asides about the lands they visit. Also like its prequels, the journey is too minutely recorded for general consumption; it will serve best as a memoir for the author’s friends and family. And although Hofmann’s prose is reliably clear and passionate, it can devolve into theatricality at times: “I feel like I’m living inside a CIA thriller.” Still, this is an incisive and granular travelogue for those who want to emulate the author’s journey, and her accounts of cultural mores are fascinating, as in her astute comparison of Thai and Malaysian history.
A beautifully produced travelogue, but one that’s far too long and detailed to have very broad appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9995263-0-9
Page Count: 456
Publisher: PIP Productions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 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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