An animated story of survival and an exuberant display of how to live well.
In this debut memoir, a fight with pancreatic cancer prompts the author to reflect on life, meditate on mortality, and enumerate the pleasures of company and food.
From the beginning, Grau promises to lighten the account of her cancer battle with a hefty dose of humor. “Laughter over tears,” she writes, “because without the ability to laugh, the urge to surrender would be too strong.” After the tumor was discovered and as the treatment began, she sent cheeky email updates to the members of her community center in Cambria, California, where she taught dance aerobics and weight training. The author sprinkles these emails throughout the book, and though they often take the shortest route to easy gallows humor, it’s enjoyable to read these lively and irreverent missives. Grau sometimes resorts to platitudes like “Hadn’t I heard somewhere that laughter is the best medicine?,” which can derail otherwise well-paced sections. Not all attempts at comedy land, but the depiction of an overenthusiastic local surgeon is as funny as it is unsettling. In another creatively rendered and well-executed passage, the author uses the tasting notes of wine to describe the flavor of her drug regimen. Other parts speak to paranoia and mortality, as when Grau begins connecting various scrapes with death into a single narrative of survival. The author calls herself a “toughie,” her dad’s phrase, and suggests her surviving cancer isn’t unrelated to her growing up in the South Bronx. Grau’s attempts at humor do lighten the mood of the work, even if they fail to distinguish it much from other accounts of cancer battles. But the book doesn’t really aim to break new ground, and though it delivers familiar truisms about cherishing loved ones, savoring the good times, and being grateful for life, it owns up to its treacly spirit. A truism might not be new or interesting—but at least it’s true, and at most a source of comfort to someone who wants it.
An animated story of survival and an exuberant display of how to live well.Pub Date: March 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73359-090-7
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
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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