Stone rows his boat into a work of art.
In an impeccable piece of travel-writing, newcomer Stone travels by rowboat on a course that turns the eastern US into a big island that he transportingly circumnavigates.
“I had plain adventure in mind, to be sure,” he declares, “to live by my wits and material minimums.” The adventure is to row up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal, and on to the Allegheny (after the briefest of portages), then down the Ohio and Mississippi to the Gulf, around Florida and back up the coast to Eastport, Maine, at the Canadian border. Though he was raised around water and his father was a crack rower, Stone is no professional: he’d never even pulled the oars of his 17-foot scull until the morning he set off from Brooklyn, and it wasn’t until Pittsburgh that he got important tips on technique and equipment. But once afloat, he gradually settles into a comfortable rhythm that includes the nightly chore of finding a place to sleep, whether that means pitching his tent (to say the trip was done on a shoestring might be an overstatement) or accepting the generosity of people he meets. In recounting his voyage, Stone uses words freely yet with a poem’s compression, a coiled energy deftly released, as when he describes the mechanics of the rowing stroke or the correct pronunciation of Atchalafaya (“one easy breath, ‘Chuff-uh-lye’”). There are enough snafus and mistakes to keep him human, and while his encounters with people are mostly pleasant and frequently revealing about the place, there are a few ugly moments as well, including the time he was invited to join a picnic gathering and then, for no discernible reason, summarily evicted (“GET OFF THIS PROPERTY. NOW!”) by the patriarch of the group. Throughout, he keeps his sense of the journey’s importance in perspective with an engaging combination of innocence and opinion.
Stone rows his boat into a work of art.Pub Date: July 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0841-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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