by M K Agarwal ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 2018
An effortless, genial assemblage of vignettes.
An eclectic collection of short essays delivers cultural analysis.
Debut author Agarwal has always been an avid reader, and each evening looks forward to a good book as an “opiate for sound sleep.” Likewise, he intends this compilation of brief meditations to be diverting, but also “of relevance for all times.” The breadth of the topics he addresses is eccentrically broad, and the work as a whole is intellectually peripatetic. In some chapters, he fixes his eye on linguistic matters; for example, there are free-wheeling discussions of the words “if,” “but,” and “stealing” as well as the possibility that language is infested by chauvinism. He considers the color white as a cultural symbol of “purity, beauty, and chastity.” In an essay entitled “The Avocation of Carping,” Agarwal considers the apparently profound human inclination to complain. For the most part, the author avoids explicitly political issues, but in “The Bureaucratic Juggernaut,” he assesses the inefficiency and capriciousness of unwieldy organizational structures and proposes a series of cures. In punchy and charming prose, Agarwal permits his analytical gaze to roam freely in search of peculiar points of observation—he composes a kind of paean to the month of May. Not all of the author’s musings are equally original—in one, he opposes the “the vituperations of a scolding, carping and brawling wife” to a “hen-pecked husband.” In another, he regurgitates a shopworn caricature: “If the way to a man’s heart, according to an old axiom, lies in appeasing his taste buds, that to a woman’s is through the satiation of her shopping instinct.” In addition, some of the essays combine an all-too-quotidian subject matter with a lecturing tone—the author provides pages of bullet-pointed counsel regarding traffic safety. Agarwal’s intended aims are fairly modest: “The whole treatment is intended to entertain the reader, and not cause him the fatigue of close attention.” For the most part, he hits his own mark and produces an amiably easy series of largely disconnected reflections.
An effortless, genial assemblage of vignettes.Pub Date: July 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4828-2054-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
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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