Activists of all descriptions will find encouragement in these uplifting, albeit brief, success stories filled with...
This compilation of interviews by debut editors Burke and Caso comes from The Women’s Eye, a radio show and website celebrating the accomplishments of women working for change.
“Our subjects’ goals are sometimes daunting and certainly wide-ranging,” say the editors. “They build schools where there were none, promote global women’s issues in treacherous places and uncover ingenious new ways to feed the hungry, rescue children and more.” Each entry is an excerpt from a website or radio interview and furthers the editors’ efforts “to spread stories of optimism, triumph, mission and purpose.” We learn about Maggie Doyne, who, on a gap year after high school, was moved by the desperate poverty she saw in Nepal. She wired home for her $5,000 in savings, used it to buy land in Surkhet, and built the Kopila Valley Children’s Home School, which she still runs today. Retired teacher and guidance counselor Estella Pyfrom also invested personal savings—roughly $1 million, though not all at once—buying a bus to bring computers and the internet to underprivileged Florida kids. Tina Hovsepian invented an inexpensive portable cardboard shelter for the homeless; it provides more than just a refuge from some of the elements. “In addition to providing a safe space, there is a psychological aspect,” she says. “Cardborigami provides…privacy, which you and I take for granted.” Other women have similarly inspiring accounts and are given space to tell those stories in their own words. Question prompts follow the journalistic “who, what, when, where, how” convention, but sometimes the interviews feel like press releases, and more in-depth discussions about how these experiences have changed the subjects would be welcome. The editors boast an enviable international network linking them to ordinary, often unheralded women who are “searching for solutions and new arenas of opportunity, and who [are] reaching out to improve the world in spite of the challenging circumstances.” The optimistic tone and diversity of the projects demonstrate that there are countless ways for those with vision to generate positive change.
Activists of all descriptions will find encouragement in these uplifting, albeit brief, success stories filled with recommendations and ideas.Pub Date: July 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9977054-5-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: The Women's Eye
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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