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CASANOVA’S PARROT

Name: CASANOVA’S PARROT
Author: Mark Bryant
ISBN: 0-7867-1092-0

AND OTHER TALES OF THE FAMOUS AND THEIR PETS

by Mark Bryant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002

Bryant (ed., Sins of the Fathers, 1997, etc.) comes up with a few standouts, but this is mostly thin fare. Players of...

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Factoids of varying quality—some a page long, others a sentence (“Toulouse-Lautrec kept a male canary called Lolo”)—best consumed as a literary snack over a few days.

Of the categories of owners (literary, royal, political, military, etc.), writers are the ones—perhaps because they wrote about them—whose pets are the most fully realized. There’s Taki, the cat Raymond Chandler called his secretary because she was always there, sitting on his papers. Alexander Dumas’s cat, Mysouff, once ate all the rare birds in the house with the help of the family’s three tame monkeys (each named after a literary critic). Dumas wrote: “Mysouff was declared guilty, but with extenuating circumstances—merely condemned to five years of incarceration with the apes.” Mark Twain, whose daughter once observed, “the difference between Mamma and Papa is that Mamma loves morals and Papa loves cats,” described a kitten that liked to sit in a corner pocket of the billiard table and “[watch] the game.” The poet William Cowper, who wrote “An Epitaph on a Hare,” had three of those animals, which he brought into his parlor after supper to play. Royalty mostly favored dogs—George VI was responsible for introducing the now ubiquitous Welsh corgi, although Queen Victoria also had favorite horses and cats, and Frederick the Great of Prussia so loved his dogs that he wished to be buried with them, a wish granted only in 1991, after Germany’s reunification. American presidents have tended to prefer a range of pets: James Garfield had a mare called Kit and a dog named Veto; Benjamin Harrison, a billy goat called Old Whiskers; and Calvin Coolidge two raccoons, Rebecca and Horace. The parrot of the title was taught by Casanova to make slanderous comments in public about a former mistress of his master.

Bryant (ed., Sins of the Fathers, 1997, etc.) comes up with a few standouts, but this is mostly thin fare. Players of Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, etc., will enjoy.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-7867-1092-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.