An earnest account of a passionate marriage.
Love overcomes the boundaries imposed by language and political borders in this debut romantic memoir.
Cloutier was raised in a traditional household near Naples, Italy. The children and her mother deferred to her father in all matters, with homemade meals served three times a day. When her mother died unexpectedly, as the oldest child there was no question that the author would manage the household. After returning from the hospital, her father coldly asserted: “Let’s go, Luisa…the kids are hungry.” She desperately hoped for more. Her brother’s girlfriend discovered that American Marines would attend a local dance and encouraged her to enjoy a rare night out. She met a handsome Marine named Brandon, who treated her with more respect than the patriarchal Italians: “God must have heard my prayers and sent me this American Marine.” Romance ensued despite the language barrier. Eventually, Brandon was sent back to the United States, and, months later, Cloutier followed him. They didn’t want to separate again so they married and the author obtained citizenship. But like many young couples struggling financially, they worked long hours and spent less time together. She became disenchanted: “We’re not married. You’re never here…I just can’t live like this.” After a brief separation, they reunited and rekindled their love. Tragically, one night Brandon went to take a shower and suddenly collapsed. An undiagnosed heart condition ended their fairy-tale romance after only a decade together. In her candid memoir, Cloutier recalls a love that was more intense than many lifetime liaisons. The strongest parts of the account deliver deft descriptions of the cherished traditions and outdated gender dynamics of Italy. But while the book is certainly unconventional in many respects, it doesn’t provide enough sparkling passages and unexpected reflections to make it stand out in the overcrowded romance and memoir fields. Although the work recounts the author’s painful and revelatory journey after her beloved husband’s death, the final chapter offers readers an abrupt ending. In addition, a bevy of mundane details slows the story’s momentum (“The next weekend, when Brandon came down from Twenty-nine Palms, I walked outside to the driveway to greet him. As I approached the car, I felt the heat from the motor after the two hour drive. Brandon opened the door and climbed out”).
An earnest account of a passionate marriage.Pub Date: May 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-052-2
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 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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