A heartfelt but ultimately tedious journey of discovery for two corporate execs who shuck the rat race and hit the road. The whirl of publishing had finally gotten to Abraham (most recently vice president and editor in chief at Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks) and her husband, Sandy. They wanted to scale back, grab ahold of their lives. They bought an RV (Abraham never claims to be another Kerouac, and besides, Sandy had once contracted armpit crabs in an Alaskan dive, so they wanted a secure cocoon), rented out their home, and pointed west by northwest. What follows is the story of their trip from New York City to Alaska, then back to the East Coast. Abraham might have hoped that rubbing lunchtime shoulders with writers would transmit some of their magic to her, but it didn't. Her writing is self-conscious and clunky, though also disarmingly, agreeably frank, her regional impressions worn right there on her sleeve. She conveys an urbanite's surprised thrill at Manitoba's checkered plains and falls deeply in awe of Alaska's grandness, which leads her to tune in to the music of the spheres, to feel time expand. Abraham expands as well, delighting in the pleasures of her mate, food, and corporate-world-bashing. But as she tends south and east, the old bogeymen haunt her again: where to live, how to pay the bills. Westward she searched for circadian rhythms, eastward she scours real estate, the escapee becoming the wanabee. Colorado? Santa Fe? No longer kicked-back or wide-eyed, Abraham is as frantic to find a new home as she ever was back at the salt mines, the leaden prose whining and grating, her urgency without appeal. Abraham the dreamer felt cut from honest cloth; Abraham the overachiever, who has won out by book's end, is a bad copy.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-440-50757-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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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