A dandy, in-depth look at the Sport of Kings, the $10- billion-a-year horse-racing business, and the ``weekend recreational gamblers,'' jockeys, trainers, grooms, and officials who work on the ``backside,'' behind the scenes. The appeal, according to Helm, a San Francisco journalist and publisher, ``is that it is the most complex and interesting form of gambling.'' But there are also the fabled traditions of the sport, the entertainment factor, and the camaraderie that draws a varied audience. Helm's trackside cronies include a chef, a blues critic, a ``street artist/grant hustler.'' a mail marrier, a retired black woman, and a wine salesman. It's the grandstand kibitzing, the arguing over horses and jockeys and odds, as much as their occasional winnings, that brings them back to the track. Helm became interested in the daily operations of Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows and gained access to the morning workouts on the backside, a world he learned was like a ``small medieval city'' with its own language and traditions. His lengthy interview with jockey ``Cowboy'' Jack Kaenel, who won the 1982 Preakness on Aloma's Ruler, reveals the finer points of a demanding profession. Helm delves into the arcane mechanics of horse-racing, such as the difference between ``claiming'' races, derbies, stakes, and allowances, and the weight and equipment requirements. But at the heart of the book are his profiles of trainers like Chuck Jenda, whose mounts have won an astounding 20% of their races; of the track superintendents, who attempt to maintain consistent conditions in all sorts of weather; of the veterinarian whose individual judgment decides ``racing soundness''; of the ``powerful, but largely anonymous'' stewards who are the arbiters charged with ensuring the ``integrity of racing''; and of the racing superintendent, the ``matchmaker'' who is like the ``director of a theatrical event.'' A sure thing for novices, but there's enough intelligently presented information and inside dope to attract even the most jaded track veteran.
Pub Date: May 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-8050-1326-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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