by Pam Munter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2018
A textured, sometimes-cutting remembrance of a life of remarkable achievement.
Munter (When Teens Were Keen, 2005) recalls a career working as a psychologist, actor, and musician in this memoir.
Growing up in the 1950s in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, the author had an early fascination with the “glamorous and unknowable” lives of Hollywood celebrities. She had a burning desire to be like Doris Day, and she was enamored by a moment in the film By the Light of the Silvery Moon, when the actress “emerged from under a model T, all greasy, having successfully fixed the family flivver”—which she notes was radical for the “sexist 1950s.” Like Day’s character, Munter also disregarded the prescribed gender roles of her era; her initial career path led to her to study clinical psychology, and she became “the only full-time, tenure-tracked female in the entire psychology department” at Portland State University in Oregon. The author describes 1970s academia as being dominated by a clique of sexists (or “Rat Men”) who vindictively sought to impede her progress. But Munter was tenacious, and she developed a media presence as a TV psychologist, to the disdain of her “rat colleagues.” A foray into show business offers another example of the author’s determination: “It all started innocently enough. I just wanted some voice lessons,” she writes, but it led to a radical career change. She eventually recorded an album for Capitol Records and performed cabaret in New York City. She also worked as a character actor, receiving her first movie role in the 1999 film Birddog. As a writer, Munter shoots straight from the hip. Her self-understanding is clearly reinforced by her expertise as a clinical psychologist: “my personality was composed of both male and female characteristics—classic androgyny—when that was not mainstream or even socially acceptable.” Throughout her life, she says, she was reminded of her “outsider status” but never surrendered to convention. At one point, she describes a 20/20 interview with TV personality Geraldo Rivera in the late 1970s, in which he questioned her about a cult; she’d treated a few of its members. As Munter notes, Rivera was “known for his incisive questioning,” but when he impatiently asked her to “say something more dramatic,” she remained professional and avoided “slipping into personal invective.” She’s not one to sugarcoat an encounter, though; she also acerbically narrates that “the effluvia in his wake made it nauseatingly clear he had not had time to shower that morning.” However, the author is unafraid to turn her critical ferocity upon herself, as well. About seeing herself on the big screen for the first time, she writes, “In every neurological cell, I had hoped to be scintillating, memorable, even great. But I wasn’t.” The memoir suffers from occasional, unnecessary repetition, as when Munter twice describes how, as a teenager, she’d pretend to take a phone call from an agent in a restaurant. However, this doesn’t detract from the memoir’s inspirational portions, which urge women to realize their dreams.
A textured, sometimes-cutting remembrance of a life of remarkable achievement.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-949180-17-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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