Eby brings fine sensibility to her readings of all her subjects’ works and, in polished prose, offers a fresh look at their...
Seeking the heart of Southern writing.
Essayist and journalist Eby (Rock and Roll Baby Names: Over 2,000 Music-Inspired Names, from Alison to Ziggy, 2012) pays homage to 10 Southern writers in this illuminating journey to the homes, towns, and landscapes that nurtured them. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, the author came to understand her identity as a Southerner by reading Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and, of course, William Faulkner. Besides these usual suspects, she includes the “harsh and haunting” Harry Crews, memoirist Richard Wright, Lee’s irascible friend Truman Capote, and fiction writers Barry Hannah, John Kennedy Toole, and Larry Brown. Eby embarked on this odyssey, she writes, “to see the places they had lived in and written about, to breathe the same air, to hear the same accents and meet the same people.” Many homes have been preserved for visitors. Being in Welty’s, Eby reports, feels “like dropping into one of her stories.” At O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm in Milledgevile, Eby imagined her surrounded by her peacocks, writing in a “small, almost monastic” room with a single bed and plain wooden desk. Both Welty and O’Connor felt cowed by Faulkner’s reputation. He was like “a big mountain, something majestic,” Welty said. “I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won’t get swamped,” O’Connor told a friend. Visiting Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi, Eby particularly noted his bookshelves, “custom made to store his shotgun shells along the sides,” and his liquor cabinet, replete with bottles of whiskey. She also traveled to Monroeville, a town that finds myriad ways to celebrate Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. She traces Crews’ painful childhood in Bacon County, Georgia, and sensitively evokes Toole’s New Orleans as well as his posthumous novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.
Eby brings fine sensibility to her readings of all her subjects’ works and, in polished prose, offers a fresh look at their lives and literary legacies.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24111-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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