How one views this gossamer-thin account of the doomed Doors frontman and his equally troubled common-law wife rests largely on one's (forgive the expression) ``perception of the Doors.'' This book will be tonic to those eager for more dish on the man they regard as the Rimbaud-esque cynosure of the angst-filled '60s generation. Those baffled by Morrison's fame—particularly the respect he received as a poet—will find this book supports, quite unintentionally, their contentions as well. It's not that Butler (who coauthored the 1980 Morrison bio No One Here Gets Out Alive with Danny Sugerman) didn't do her homework; among the people she interviewed and sources she consulted are the Elektra Records A&R tyro Jac Holzman and the surviving members of the Doors, school and police records, and even medical journals. The problem rests chiefly with Butler's subject. This story has in large part been told many times before, from many angles, and often to better effect. Readers, whether Doors fans or not, will have a tough time piecing events together chronologically, as this narrative only sketchily covers the background events that shaped and defined Jim and Pam's world. Additionally, Butler seems to cast a sentimental and too often uncritical eye on the ``tragic lovers' '' relationship, neglecting to acknowledge that the two were essentially beautiful booze- and drug-addled twentysomethings with money to burn, and that their fatal flaw was not so much being at odds with the material world as it was never having been forced to confront it without help from agents, roadies, groupies, or sycophants. The Doors' keyboardist and co- founder (with Jim), Ray Manzarek, claims that Pamela and Jim will ``go down in history as great lovers,'' and that their tale recalls Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard. Perhaps one could argue that a more fitting, albeit less flattering, comparison might be Sid (Vicious) and Nancy (Spungeon).
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-02-864729-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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