An engrossing combination of historic renovation, memoir, and literary and religious history.
Restoring a home serves as an extended metaphor for understanding decades-old family dysfunction, informed by Mennonite influences, in this debut memoir.
Hershberger, a retired English teacher, was no stranger to renovation or restoration when her Realtor contacted her about the Roberts house, about to be listed in Syracuse, New York. But the author, after being involved in 20 such projects, had just downsized to a three-bedroom bungalow that she intended to be carried out of in a box, and claimed no interest in “doing” another house. Furthermore, the Roberts domicile had little to recommend itself—architecturally unappealing, moldering, and derelict, all at an asking price that topped the neighborhood’s comparable dwellings. Despite these disincentives, Hershberger was inexplicably drawn to the house and embarked on the renovation of a lifetime, made more exacting by her determination that this would be her own home. The divorced mother of three was brought up by a Mennonite minister and teacher so miserable with their own lives that three of their four children were so psychically scarred that they could barely function in the real world. Hershberger worked through many of these issues, along with her own failed marriage, interest in the history of the Amish and Mennonites, and other literary and intellectual issues, during long hours of paint stripping and wallpaper peeling. Alternating with the room-by-room accounts of the restoration are memories of her childhood or stories of her relationship with her parents in adulthood. Most of the transitions are seamless, but at times, the memoir aspect overwhelms the far more appealing accounts of home improvement. While Hershberger repeatedly discusses her mother’s dissatisfaction and bitterness, as well as her father’s penuriousness, her claims that her parents’ marital dysfunction resulted in her siblings’ mental illness are not well supported (indeed, her only consultation with an outside authority occurs late in the narrative, when she discusses reading Peter D. Kramer’s Listening to Prozac). Nevertheless, readers should enjoy the fun parts of the book—house porn at its best, interspersed with inspiring quotes (for example, Emily Dickinson’s “To comprehend a nectar requires the sorest need”), and anecdotes about Mennonitism.
An engrossing combination of historic renovation, memoir, and literary and religious history.Pub Date: May 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-578-18031-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Cottonwood Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
