A heartfelt and intriguing story that offers readers a window into the Cuban diaspora.
A slim debut memoir paints a portrait of one family’s escape from their Cuban home after Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Batista government.
From the moment Castro “came down from the hills” in 1959 and took over Havana, middle-class Cubans began talking about fleeing. The brutality of the military’s systematic execution of anyone suspected of being a capitalist enemy of the new government created a climate of constant fear. In 1961, at the age of 7, Isidro was aware of some of the changes—“school had become less about learning and more about political indoctrination. There were no more songs and stories and childlike drawings filled with bright colors.” But beautiful, tropical Cuba was still her home. In September of that year, she and her parents stepped aboard a plane whisking them to Jamaica and a boardinghouse that would serve as a waystation before their trip to Miami. It was exciting and terrifying for the little girl, who would become a full-fledged American living in Stamford, Connecticut, never forgetting her Cuban roots. Her maternal grandparents would follow several months later and lived with them for the rest of their lives, re-creating a Cuban home in the cold North that brought the author comfort and some conflicts. The book opens in 2016, with Isidro looking back at her childhood, as she is about to visit Cuba for the first time in more than half a century. Through evocative prose, she captures the general immigrant experience of navigating a new country and culture as well as the tightrope she walked between acclimating to American life and trying to adhere to the traditions maintained at home. Most of all, she communicates in this tender, vibrant account the enduring love for her parents and grandparents and her appreciation of the hardships they endured to provide her with a safer life. Thinking of warm family celebrations, she writes: “I play some of them over in my mind, like vintage films, and watch the faces and smiles of those now long departed fade softly, like still frames in an aging reel.”
A heartfelt and intriguing story that offers readers a window into the Cuban diaspora.Pub Date: June 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6971-3
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2017
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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