An unusual, engaging historical biography of a California artist.
A beautifully illustrated book by a former teacher that sheds light on the intriguing life of a pioneer woman.
Passero’s debut tells the little-known story of Clara Mason Fox, an artist and poet who led a rather adventurous, exciting life. Fox, the author’s husband’s ancestor, was a member of a pioneer family who moved to California in 1887. She later traveled to New York to attend art school and became a painter and poet, capturing some early images of Laguna Beach and Orange County. Passero’s project was spurred by the discovery of a box in a family attic, and it’s a labor of love that sheds light on a fascinating time in American history. She describes her extensive research in her quest to discover as much about Fox as she could. The author worked as a teacher for many years and this book seems to be aimed in part at younger readers; as a result, she weaves in sentences such as “Imagine what it was like not having any of these [modern] conveniences” to help bring the setting to life. Her inclusion of some of Fox’s paintings and sketches also works very well, resulting in an unusual combination of text and visual art that illustrates Fox’s artistic talents. The author sometimes fleshes out historical context and descriptions of early California landscapes at the expense of Fox’s story, and readers may find themselves wanting to know more about this pioneer woman’s inner life. That said, the book provides a good jumping-off point for exploring both Fox’s life and the history of the state she loved so much. Passero reveals that local California organizations have recently shown interest in Fox’s work and that some of Fox’s paintings will be exhibited at the Huntington Library in San Marino. She says that she hopes to continue generating interest in Fox’s life and work, and with this book, she seems to be doing a great job of making that happen.
An unusual, engaging historical biography of a California artist.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62652-008-0
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Mill City Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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