Everyone, it seems, wanted a piece of this superior travelogue by the National Book Award-winning author of Blood Tie, The Beulah Quintet, and Celebration—which is why parts of it are slated to run in Traveler, The New York Times Magazine, and Travel and Leisure. And though the book's subject is a hermetic land, hardly a main contender among fabled destinations, Settle works real magic on it, as clearly Turkey worked on her. She went there first in the early Seventies, a refugee from hostile gangs of teens on a Greek island where she'd intended to write a novel. In the port town of Bodrun she found solace, $l0- a-day coast cruises, and, above all, Anatolian friends. And if, on her return some 20 years later, Bodrun's recent Cìte d'Azur- ish make-over disappoints her, the rest of Settle's wanderings do not. Istanbul is her first stop, where she visits the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia; muses on the Venetian Sack of Constantinople and the genius of the l6th-century architect Sinan; and even hazards a scrub-down in a Turkish bath. Then it's on to the Black Sea, where Settle demonstrates her splendid fluency with history, literature, and myth (recalling that this coast was once the witch Medea's home). From there she plots a crescent course into the mountainous heart of Turkey, searching for remains of the Seljuk empire, ending up back on the coast listening for echoes of the Hittites, climbing Mt. Latmos, making friends, and, always, loving Turkey. Settle's eye for perfect detail never fails (the sacrificial sheep slaughtered even at modern-day ship launchings, the taste of Turkish wine). But, more, she does for Turkey what only the most accomplished travel writers do: shows why it is a place that must be visited, then makes it seem as if her readers have just come home from there.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-13-917675-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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