Valuable insights into the work of a biographer and the lives of her subjects.
A book offers a diverse collection of memories and advice about a career as a biographer.
Bober (Papa Is a Poet, 2013, etc.) began writing while bedridden with illness. She’d studied poetry in college and decided to attempt a biography of William Wordsworth. This endeavor launched a successful career as a researcher, historian, and biographer. In her memoir, Bober reflects on her craft and the ways her own life was shaped by it: “I often find myself describing…my life according to which biography I was writing at the time.” For her book on Wordsworth, she first read what was already published. When she’d recovered, she traveled to England and Wales. She saw Wordsworth’s school and home, his desk and original manuscripts, and walked along the Wye River where he’d composed. This pattern—Bober’s insistence on experiencing places and objects relevant to her subjects—would repeat through her eight biographies. In this sense, her memoir serves as guidebook for writers. She shows what it takes to be “a storyteller whose facts are true.” When researching Thomas Jefferson, she made arrangements to see the desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence; a photograph would not do. Bober also discusses the challenge of portraying a complex personality. Her chapter on artist Louise Nevelson is intriguing. The author loved Nevelson’s work but, as a devoted mother and grandmother, she could not fully comprehend the sculptor’s choice of art over family. Further, Nevelson was living when Bober was writing her biography but was not particularly forthcoming with details of her life. The author’s account of working through these challenges provides sage advice for any researcher or writer. Bober asserts that her various subjects chose her and that she aims to tell her own “adventure.” This comes through: readers see Bober evolve as a biographer—and then into a Jefferson scholar—and her love of research and writing is palpable. On the whole, however, the book remains more about her subjects, particularly in the later chapters on American history. Perhaps this is inevitable for an inveterate biographer.
Valuable insights into the work of a biographer and the lives of her subjects.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6188-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 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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