A frank remembrance that tells of how the author found the strength to free herself from a dangerous situation.
A debut memoir that explores a young woman’s time in an abusive relationship.
In early 1970s Atlanta, Scott was just beginning a career as a computer programmer after obtaining a degree in computer science: “Rare for anyone in the late 1960s—more rare for females back then, and especially rare for a black female,” she notes. Between writing computer code and navigating a new city, a lonely Scott met and fell in love with Mark, a handsome, passionate African-American man with strong convictions and opinions. He seemed like the perfect boyfriend—until, she says, he struck her in a moment of jealous rage, leaving her with a bruise on her face. The author, a self-reliant woman, made no excuses for his behavior and immediately distanced herself from him and sought counseling. However, the primary advice that she received from her counselor was to marry Mark, in order to quell his jealous outbursts—and she followed that advice: “My desire to get married blocked out any wisdom that I should have had,” she says. Not long into the marriage, she writes, Mark’s paranoia returned. She says that he interpreted calls that she received from work and even pieces of cigarette paper on the floor as evidence of Scott’s alleged lovers, and that he attacked her with increasing violence. Scott relates instances of abuse with forceful prose: “He rammed me. With his fist. In my face.” The short, brutal sentences seem to come out of nowhere, just as she says Mark’s rage did. She also excels at re-creating the anxiety of trying to escape such a situation; she offers deeply affecting accounts of her hesitation while crossing a parking lot and of waiting in an airport while trying to get away from Mark. Scott focuses entirely on this relationship throughout the book, so she misses many opportunities to develop the story of her earlier life. The resulting memoir, however, offers an important analysis of her frame of mind during a difficult time. At one point, for instance, she says that she successfully escaped Mark, but later returned. Overall, she provides a firsthand account of how an extraordinary, capable person can still be manipulated by another.
A frank remembrance that tells of how the author found the strength to free herself from a dangerous situation.Pub Date: July 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996009-0-0
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Phoenix Enix Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
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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