Pearlman, editor of Listen to Their Voices (1993) and A Voice of One's Own (not reviewed), has a talent for rustling up the most interesting guests for her literary salons. This new collection of essays, centering on the nature of friendship, and its importance in these women writers' lives, is no exception. What are friends for? How does one find them? How is it possible to hang onto them through all of life's vicissitudes? Pearlman's essayists approach these questions from refreshingly varying points of view—in some cases revealing shameful secrets of their own pasts, and in others offering rousing tributes to companions who have helped make life's journey fun. Margot Livesey's luminous evocation of her isolated Scottish childhood ends with the discovery of friends in less class-conscious America who have helped her rediscover her past. Michelle Cliff celebrates her glamorous Jamaican grandmother, half Jean Rhys and half Auntie Mame, who applauded Cliff's efforts to write about long-suppressed family secrets. Jane Smiley tackles the ticklish subject of using friends as literary fodder. Wendy Wasserstein worries over competition between women friends. Carolyn See offers a vivid picture of two girls growing up poor in East Hollywood and remaining best friends as they make their marks on the world. And in a particularly unsettling piece, Angela Davis-Gardner describes a pubescent obsession with the most popular girl in her North Carolina school, a ``non-friend'' who inhabited the bookish Davis- Gardner's dreams for decades—until the writer's progress in her work set her free. A passionate and profoundly life-affirming collection. (Serial rights to Ladies Home Journal, Glamour, Utne Reader, etc.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-65785-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
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
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
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