As touted by the publisher, another candidate to fill the hole left by the late Erma Bombeck. It’s unfortunate that every writer who tries to find a few laughs in the sturm und drang of raising children needs to be compared to Bombeck or Dave Barry. True, Borgman is no Erma Bombeck, but why should she have to be? She is a nationally syndicated columnist (more than 350 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service clients) whose subjects are kids, family, husband, and keeping it all together. This is a collection of her columns, organized loosely into chapters such as “I Cook, Therefore I Am,” about feeding a family of five; “Household Hazards,” about the challenges of running a household for same; and “Are We Having Fun Yet?,” about traveling with same. The columns are sometimes amusing, occasionally moving or insightful. A few fall flat. Amusing : “A Field of Greens,” about coaching her husband to cook using sports metaphors, or “Joy Ride,” about coping with a choking baby and two school-age terrorists in the backseat of a minivan 30 seconds before the light changes. Moving: “The Long Good-bye,” about her mother-in-law suffering from Alzheimer’s. Insightful: “Cool, Calm, and Crazy,” about the responsibility of being a parent. Very flat: “Misdemeanor Recipes,” about who should really get the credit for hand-me- down recipes. A section called “The Heart of Things” waxes maudlin on old-fashioned virtues, like duty, responsibility and saying no to your children. Borgman is witty and has a playful imagination. On the other hand, why spend 21 bucks on this uneven collection’subscribe to one of the newspapers that carries her column, and you’ll get the day’s news as well.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02722-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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