Having masterfully re-created the major characters and events of Arthurian romance in King Arthur (1986) and Merlin (1987), Goodrich brings her scholarly skills, her prodigious knowledge of sixth-century Britain, and her impassioned style to vindicate Guinevere and rescue her from the obscurities of time. This Guinevere is a collective identity derived from history, legend, myth, literature, and scholarly debate. Slipping often from fact to faith, Goodrich claims that Arthur married Guinevere for her dowry, the Eastern Highlands of Scotland including ``Camelot'' and an estate called ``the Round Table.'' Under matriarchal law, this land became Arthur's as soon as the marriage was consummated, placing Guinevere, like all young brides under this law, in great danger. Guinevere was afflicted as well with a sister also called ``Guinevere,'' possibly a twin. Attempting to replace the true Guinevere in Arthur's bed, the sister subjected the queen to various abductions, temptations, and accusations. According to Goodrich, poor Guinevere won the protection of Lancelot, supposedly her younger brother; and, as Druid priestess, she assisted him in his initiation rites by visiting the Underworld. He became known as her lover, Goodrich says, when several hundred years after their death around 542, someone mistranslated the word ``alter'' for ``bed.'' Erudite but not scholarly and lacking rigor in organization and argument. And while she depends on legend herself, with gratuitous sarcasm Goodrich accuses scholars who reject the historical validity of Arthurian romances of merely trying to protect their tenure. Still, fascinating reading, great detective work, and of considerable interest in the history of feminism. (Fifteen b&w photographs and drawings.)
Pub Date: June 5, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016442-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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