Hopeful, necessary, and true.
Young People’s Poet Laureate Engle (A Dog Named Haku, 2018, etc.) explores her tumultuous teenage and early adult years during the equally turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s.
This companion memoir to her award-winning Enchanted Air (2015) is written mostly in free verse with a spot of haiku and tanka. This is a lonely dreamer’s tale of a wayward yet resourceful young woman who zigzags to self-discovery amid the Vietnam War, Delano grape strike, moon landing, and other key historical events. Dreaming of travel to far-off lands but without the financial resources to do so, she embarks on a formal and informal educational journey that takes her from Los Angeles to Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, New York City, and back west again. With Spanish interspersed throughout, Engle speaks truthfully about the judgment she has faced from those who idealized Castro’s Cuba and the struggle to keep her Spanish alive after being cut off from her beloved mother’s homeland due to the Cold War. Employing variations in line breaks, word layout, and font size effectively, Engle’s pithy verses together read as a cohesive narrative that exudes honesty and bravery. While younger readers may not recognize some of the cultural references, themes of dating, drugs, and difficulty in college will resonate widely. Finding one’s path is not a linear process; thankfully Engle has the courage to offer herself as an example.
Hopeful, necessary, and true. (author’s note) (Poetry/memoir. 13-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2953-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
For The New Yorker, Hofstadter has taken over the role Calvin Tomkins used to fill—as art chronicler: half critic/half profile- maker. And at this he is very, very good. In the five long pieces collected here—about Jean Helion, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Avigdor Arikha, David Bomberg and the subsequent generation of London painters (Kossof, Kitaj, etc.), and Richard Diebenkorn—he almost negligently scatters brilliant associational perceptions (why, for example, Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist was hardly different from C-B the surrealist: the same ``cretinous voyaging'') while being cannier than most art writers about the varieties and dilemmas—glorious both—of representational painting. He also writes (occasionally he posturingly overwrites) with a genuinely beautiful style. But what is a little disconcerting is the form of the articles: Hofstadter seems to appear in the company of the artists he writes about here not exactly as a journalist but as an instant intimate or friend; there is an air of relaxed offhandedness (``I got to know Richard Diebenkorn in 1986, a few years before he and his wife, Phyllis, moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg, in northern California. Dick was already sixty-five then but a lot of his strict, formal, well-to-do Protestant background still showed''). This self-conscious relaxation of role carries over as well into what he has to say about the painters: He has scorn finally for the Londoners (``dungeon masters'') on account of their all-or-nothing aesthetic neuroticism and battles with life, while reserving his highest admiration for the artist who, like Diebenkorn, is serious without solemnity. Deflation of high artistic pretension and behavior in favor of pragmatic dilution always has been, editorially, a New Yorker stock-in-trade—and Hofstadter is particularly good at it. But the attractiveness of the interesting men (and most often quite interesting artists too) that he writes about seems finally more about personal style than art.
Pub Date: April 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-58111-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Music critic Orgill shares her love of music with her choice of women who influenced the music of their contemporaries and their successors, selecting the women according to her own aesthetic and experience in the music business. She highlights women who were “terrific” singers, who took charge of their lives and their careers, and who had an interesting story to tell. Each singer represents the decade in which she did her best or most prolific work. Sophie Tucker, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, and Anita O’Day represent the past. Joan Baez, Bette Midler, Madonna, and Lucinda Williams are singing today. Each chapter includes basic biographical information, anecdotes that illustrate the qualities that make each singer memorable, and descriptions of the singers’ unique musical attributes. Historical photographs illustrate the text. Teens will relate to the inclusion of facts in sidebars such as “What Madonna Wore.” We learn that Ethel Merman looked for bargains in everyday dress but splurged on a mink-trimmed chartreuse evening gown. Orgill also notes what the singers earned and how that compared to average salaries at the time. In “What’s New, ” Orgill details the changes in recorded music from the 12-inch record introduced in 1902 to the digital videodisc of 1997. Missing, however, is the development of music on the Internet. Other sidebars bring attention to musical styles or to noteworthy musical events of each period. Also included is a discography and bibliography. A lively, informative, and enthusiastic title. (Nonfiction.12+)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-81991-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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