An entertaining, inspiring memoir that ably captures an important slice of American history.
In this memoir, a man details his efforts to win recognition for his grandfather’s contributions to the construction of Mount Rushmore.
Del Bianco (In the Shadow of the Mountain, 2012) enjoyed an especially tight bond with his grandfather Luigi Del Bianco, a talented sculptor and carver. The author’s grandfather worked as the chief carver on the Mount Rushmore project under the famous designer, Gutzon Borglum, the only worker to have such an elevated distinction. But when an authoritative guide on Mount Rushmore was published in 1985, the author’s grandfather wasn’t even mentioned. Del Bianco was inspired to research his grandfather’s participation with the help of his uncle Caesar Del Bianco, who wrote to Lincoln Borglum, the designer’s son, for more information, correspondence that confirmed the significance of the role the author’s grandfather played. Del Bianco was encouraged by another author who wrote about Mount Rushmore to travel to the Library of Congress and inspect the “Borglum Papers,” a massive storehouse of correspondence Borglum wrote, a valuable historical resource. The author traveled to Mount Rushmore and tirelessly lobbied the site’s administrators to provide some official recognition of his grandfather’s achievement. The remembrance roughly bifurcates into two storylines—Del Bianco’s quest to achieve an official acknowledgement of his grandfather’s work and to create a biography of the man, an Italian immigrant who lived a remarkably eventful life. Born in 1892 aboard a ship sailing off the coast of France, he moved to the United States in 1908 at 17. He returned to Italy in 1915 to fight in World War I, and when he re-entered the United States, a friend introduced him to both Borglum and his future wife, Nicoletta. Del Bianco doggedly tracks down every available shred of information about his grandfather with the meticulousness of a forensic accountant. What emerges is not only an extraordinary biography, and an astute history of Mount Rushmore’s construction, but also an endearing account of a man’s loving homage to his grandfather. The author produced and starred in a one-man show about his grandfather, an act he was invited to perform at Mount Rushmore for a Fourth of July celebration. Del Bianco’s prose is clear and buoyant. It’s easy to be drawn into his infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter. Also, he provides an instructive technical analysis of the construction of Mount Rushmore. The recollection unfolds like a suspenseful drama, keeping the reader waiting to share the author’s discoveries and see if his grandfather is eventually accorded recognition for his work. The book includes old photographs detailing the author’s travels, his grandfather’s life, and Mount Rushmore and features pertinent documents and correspondence. Though a personal memoir, the information about Mount Rushmore should appeal to a wide audience, which will likely include those interested in either American history or sculpture.
An entertaining, inspiring memoir that ably captures an important slice of American history.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9989987-4-9
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Niche Content Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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