A worthy, if sometimes-rambling, read that will appeal to those who may be thinking about a remodel of their own.
A debut memoir of moving to Italy and extensively remodeling a house.
After American author Reynolds’ first husband died by his own hand, she traveled to Italy to take time off. On returning to Boston, where she wrote for the Boston Globe, she fell in love with an Italian man, Umberto, and ended up moving with him to the Italian island of Sardinia, after he’s offered a teaching position there. They buy a fixer-upper in the countryside, which they proceed to remodel, and pay great attention to the details. When Umberto later expressed dismay at the ugliness of white electrical outlets in an American luxury condo, Reynolds replied that Americans don’t see “beautiful palaces and frescoes” from the time they’re born; they see “Strip malls, big box stores and billboards.” Umberto countered: “Form contains function. That’s what makes Italian cars and motorbikes the best in the world.” Over the course of this book, Reynolds tells how she embraced this aesthetic as the couple knocked down walls and made a guest house out of a garage. The remodeling became not just a project, but also a way of life—if one is going to lift the cabinets to change the tile, shouldn’t one also change the cabinets themselves? The text tends to meander at times, as the projects mount. However, the writing is solid, overall, with notable moments; later in the memoir, for example, the author stresses that all was not an HGTV fantasy, as Sardinia had a dark side. At one point, she tells of seeing a dead dog hanging from a fence, its throat had been slit by a farmer or shepherd after it threatened some chickens. Reynolds, who’s African-American, also notes that she never got used to the stares that she received at the market from white locals. When Umberto was offered a temporary job at Harvard, Reynolds bought an apartment in Boston—which, of course, led to other building projects.
A worthy, if sometimes-rambling, read that will appeal to those who may be thinking about a remodel of their own.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-418-6
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
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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