A searing memoir of family ties that bind all too cruelly.
An impoverished girl in Portugal endures a hellish childhood in this moving autobiography.
Talk about being born under a cloud–the author was conceived when her mother Angelina, a housemaid in a tiny Portuguese village, was raped by an employer. Her prospects ruined, Angelina abandons Maria to her parents’ care. On her rare visits, she can barely bring herself to acknowledge her daughter’s existence. Maria’s first eight years with her doting grandparents seem idyllic, but when her grandmother dies she goes to live with Angelina and her new family. There Angelina’s resentment at the daughter who embodies her trauma and shame flares into outright hatred. Maria is ignored or treated like a slave, beaten for the slightest mistake, poked and scalded and fed rotten leftovers while Angelina and her common-law husband and their children feast on fresh food. Her terror and loneliness are heartbreaking, but she never loses her spirit. Through all the abuse she vows to get an education and find a way out of her miserable straits. The drama subsides a bit after Maria, seizing every break she can get, emigrates to Canada. She drifts through jobs and relationships and finally settles into a contented marriage, but her longing to discover her father and come to terms with her mother persists. Trautman’s lightly fictionalized account of her youth is vivid and gripping. Her enchanting portrait of life in her grandparents’ village sets up a shocking contrast with the grim and gritty confines of her mother’s Lisbon apartment. Angelina is a memorable character–at times she’s almost a fairy-tale ogress, but readers feel the sense of humiliation and dispossession that fuels her rage at her flesh and blood. The author’s luminous prose tells this story with immediacy and pathos.
A searing memoir of family ties that bind all too cruelly.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4415-6787-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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