A well-written memoir that examines the author’s personal and political struggles in academia and the world at large.
A compelling memoir set against the backdrop of major historical events of the mid-20th century.
To say that Lee’s formative years were distinctive is an understatement. Born to a Chinese father and a German mother, he lived in China, Germany, Mauritius and Iran before immigrating to the United States in 1946. As might be expected, the first chapter of his book shows his remarkable adaptability as he negotiates multiple languages, cultures and educational systems. Even after he reaches the United States, his experiences as a young man span many locations: high school in New York City, an undergraduate career at Harvard, summer employment in New Hampshire, graduate school in Baltimore and Chicago, and an early teaching career at the University of Maryland. A central theme of academic freedom emerges in a chapter titled “Witnessing Witch Hunt in Washington,” as several of Lee’s professors at Johns Hopkins face professional consequences for their beliefs and actions. A decade later, Lee himself is investigated by the FBI while working as a Far Eastern Analyst in the Foreign Affairs Division of the Library of Congress. This setback foreshadows what is to come and leads Lee in 1963 to the University of Hawaii, where the bulk of the memoir takes place. As America’s involvement in Vietnam escalates and the anti-war movement gathers strength, questions about Lee’s role as adviser to the Student Partisan Alliance, a radical activist organization, lead the administration to rescind its recommendation to grant Lee tenure. Throughout the book, but particularly in these two extensive chapters, Lee cleverly and effectively weaves his personal history together with the political happenings on campus, in the nation and abroad. He also provides succinct background information for readers who may be unfamiliar with the era’s events and includes photographs, documents and articles to support the text. The memoir concludes with the resolution of the tenure issue and the author’s trip to parts of Asia (including Saigon) in 1969, as well as further protest actions in 1970. However, because Lee only recounts the first half of his life in this volume, readers will sense that there is much more to tell.
A well-written memoir that examines the author’s personal and political struggles in academia and the world at large.Pub Date: March 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615822389
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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