No strolls in Provence or Walter Mitty reveries; these intense pieces are for the aspiring Lawrence of Arabia. All are...
The latest entry in the successful Best American series offers a tough-minded collection of 26 extreme voyages testing endurance and granting revelation.
Noting that the world has now been “visited and revisited,” editor Theroux chooses works that reflect the writers’ “independence and self sufficiency to make discoveries . . . [and] look for places that have changed, or places to visit in a new way.” The articles, he notes, also encompass current elements of travel-writing (a term that makes him uneasy), including the drift into autobiography, the experience of travel as adversity, and greater “penetration” of writers at their sites. So Gretel Ehrlich travels to Greenland to accompany the Inuit on a spring trip to hunt seal and walrus; Philip Caputo rides and walks Kenya seeking Tsavo lions; Bob Shacochis moves amidst Texas and the Turks and Caicos Islands to recall the life of a once-fearless adventurer and his spirited, now-deceased wife. These and other selections by Russell Banks, Scott Anderson et al. blend captivating stories with questions about the call away from the world; in essence, they ask what gives some people, as Shacochis says in “Something Wild in the Blood,” “the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent [their] own life.” Another kind of response comes with Susan Minot’s piece on Ugandan child-kidnapping: a call for political action. On the whole, the essays are captivating; only occasionally is the spell broken long enough for readers to wonder why they’re climbing that mountain, and why they’re so far from home.
No strolls in Provence or Walter Mitty reveries; these intense pieces are for the aspiring Lawrence of Arabia. All are tinged with the madness of seeking danger; the best also reveal an unquenchable longing and a fervent humanity.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-11877-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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