An impressive and enjoyable collection.
The first full-color photographic encyclopedia of heritage silver spoons spanning the breadth of Canada.
The seed for this book was planted in 1967 when Refaussé purchased a few silver spoons in Calgary on her way to attend Expo 67 in Montreal. Over the next 30-plus years, she and her husband amassed a collection of spoons from all across their vast country. Organized geographically, the book opens with spoons of the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island on the country’s eastern coast and then gradually moves west, ending in British Columbia on Canada’s Pacific shore. The provinces and territories are all represented by sections, as is the Calgary-Edmonton Corridor, an urbanized region in the province of Alberta. The photographs clearly display the intricate detailing of the spoons’ handles, as well as engraved names and scenes in the spoons’ bowls. (The author provides small, offset photos in cases where this detailing is overshadowed or unclear in the primary picture.) Rounding out the collection is a page dedicated to provincial and Canadian crests, along with a photo of the Sister City Trophy (a work of silver and carved wood commissioned by the city of Burnaby, British Columbia, in honor of its sister city of Kushiro, Japan). The trophy seems a little out of place given the rest of the book’s undeterred focus on spoons, but a note on the back cover flap explaining that Refaussé designed the trophy explains its inclusion as a sort of culmination of a life spent in silver. Finally, the book presents a list of silver manufacturers and companies, including company symbols, locations and dates of operation. Even those not predisposed to souvenir collecting (though the spoons are now available for sale—inquiries can be made by fax to 604-597-1881) will be astonished by some of the spoons Refaussé has accumulated, particularly the beautifully rendered pick-and-shovel spoons representative of the Yukon. In her foreword, the author alludes to the rich Canadian history encapsulated in these silver treasures, and while the history lesson would have benefited from additional text to provide some context for the images, the craftsmanship of the spoons is a reward unto itself.
An impressive and enjoyable collection.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0981334608
Page Count: 102
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2010
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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