Group dynamics and danger make for an engaging African adventure.
Nearly two decades ago a young Irish lad signed on for a trans-Africa adventure. Here he details his journey from Ramsgate to the Indian Ocean.
TV documentarian Magan (Angels and Rabies: A Journey Through the Americas, 2007, etc.) started his globetrotting career at the tender age of 20, when he took his life savings of £1,000 and embarked on a truck ride from Casablanca to Mombasa. He and 18 fellow travelers headed south from Morocco across the desert, then due east from Togo through Darkest Africa to Kenya. This troupe of strangers on a six-month journey of discovery looked less like Stanley’s band of explorers and more like performers in an odd replay of Lord of the Flies. Among the diverse cast bouncing along in the old truck were nurses on holiday, an athletic Lothario, a military type and a nubile London girl. None seemed to have made any progress in emotional maturity since junior high. On the road, they picked up additional extravagant figures like sex-starved Englishwoman Salade and hard-partying shepherd Mustafa. Taking occasional leave of his group to sample native food, drugs, djinns and dalliance, the author showed scarce concern for the very real dangers of AIDS. The pleasures of sexual byplay and innuendo were dampened here and there by angry crowds, avaricious border guards and venal military police. Their guide Suzi tended to abandon the wayfarers when the going got tough. Through domains of dictators, robbed of money, passports and food, sick and starving in the Heart of Darkness, the author and his fellows encountered pygmies, an albino and eventually some Peace Corps workers who came to their aid. A terrible time was had by all. Yet, resting under a baobab tree, Magan reflected on his adventure and was glad he had taken the road trip of a lifetime.
Group dynamics and danger make for an engaging African adventure.Pub Date: April 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-86322-389-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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