Readers may find a nibble of food for thought but will need to look elsewhere for the full meal.
Ricci shares his thoughts on the perils of corrupt government control in his debut nonfiction work.
From the start, Ricci stands firmly by his beliefs and bluntly states his perspective that the world is being “led to the slaughter by its government.” Each chapter touches on some element of this threat. He opens with a discussion on the link between Big Oil and the government, then moves into an argument against public instruction on evolution and the manner in which religious belief has been curtailed in the public realm. Other topics he elaborates on include government debt, private debt, federal financial regulations and government handouts. Each chapter tackles a different topic, but each claim supports his overall statement concerning the hazards of government control. Ricci organizes his thoughts in a clean manner and manages to steer clear of any distracting rabbit trails. Moreover, he offers intriguing viewpoints and clearly holds strong convictions about these views. While the honesty and dedication are admirable, he doesn’t lead readers through his thought process in an adequately convincing way. Occasionally, there’s a snippet of research: For instance, in his evolution chapter, he mentions a speech delivered by Dr. Colen Patterson, a senior paleontologist for the British Museum of Natural History, in which Patterson challenged experts on evolution to tell him one thing they knew to be true about it. There are too many instances, however, where Ricci jumps straight from Point A to Point B without showing readers how he got there. In one chapter, he states, “There is coming a day when you will be persecuted and prosecuted for simply endorsing the idea that God created the world and that the government is wrong”—an unsupported statement that seems alarmist instead of insightful. Readers who disagree or are unsure may find the lack of background detail off-putting. As it stands, the book is better suited for readers who already agree with the author than those who need convincing.
Readers may find a nibble of food for thought but will need to look elsewhere for the full meal.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493642830
Page Count: 86
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
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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