Only occasionally reaches emotional depth—seems like a tardy attempt to capitalize on the success of I Feel Bad About My...
Bland, often rambling anecdotes from the acclaimed director and screenwriter.
Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck, 2006, etc.) returns to the literary scene with a collection of essays that thematically hover around the issue of aging. “Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer’s disease and forgot the name of it,” she writes. The author compounds this humorous memory lapse alongside dozens of more egregious slips, leading to the conclusion, “All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old.” Ephron remains unapologetic throughout her waxing nostalgia, continually referring to a bygone era where people didn't use the F-word and, “I’ll tell you something else: they didn't drink wine then. Nobody knew about wine.” Throughout, the author engages in heavy doses of name-dropping, but she remains aloof. In many ways, Ephron’s humor functions as a defense mechanism against aging, and while she pokes fun at her thinning hair and fading memory, the reader anxiously awaits an honest portrayal of the woman herself. “The D Word,” a firsthand account of the difficulties of divorce, offers a rare and refreshing glimpse into the author’s world, though in the final lines the reader is corralled back into familiar terrain: “for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it’s not. Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old.” “Journalism: A Love Story” and “Going to the Movies” offer similar heartfelt accounts of a swiftly changing world, yet Ephron's willingness to open up to the reader remains the exception, not the rule. Further, the majority of her Andy Rooney–esque musings lack profundity—e.g., the opening to “The O Word,” in which each sentence occupies its own paragraph: “I’m old. I am sixty-nine years old. I’m not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I’m old. No one actually likes to admit that they’re old. The most they will cop to is that they’re older. Or oldish.”
Only occasionally reaches emotional depth—seems like a tardy attempt to capitalize on the success of I Feel Bad About My Neck.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-59560-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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