A ruminative but sometimes-confusing memoir.
A debut chronicle of one man’s outrage about the American justice system.
“Is the difference in this country between ‘moral’ and ‘legal’ something with which you are comfortable?” Ventura asks. In this memoir, he makes it clear that he’s not comfortable with it, and that he seeks to “bring justice to the Ventura family.” His hardworking father, Joseph Ventura, with the aid of his children, crafted his own version of the American Dream, turning his rental properties, construction skills and ability to see a bargain into a thriving business enterprise. “I stood high upon the top step, the ladder my father built, with my family by my side,” the author writes. After Joseph died, however, it all came crashing down. The author asserts that his alcoholic mother began to drink even more, and fell into a series of relationships with men who manipulated her finances. The court system then failed to uphold a trust that the author’s father intended to leave the family. In the end, Ventura says, the only ones who benefited from the resulting family split were lawyers and con men. But the author’s problems with the establishment don’t end there, as he contends that his efforts to do the right thing were misunderstood, and he cites lawyers and federal and state agencies that he believes have denied him justice over the past 30 years. “I have done all I can to show people that what they did and how they responded to my pleas for help was wrong,” he writes. Readers may be disturbed by his accounts of being physically escorted out of offices and courtrooms, and of orders of protection taken out against him during divorce and custody struggles. This memoir has an earnest, conversational prose style. Overall, however, readers may find this rambling account hard to follow. The author discusses his former drug addiction and arrests, but it’s not clear whether they happened when he was working at his towing or construction jobs, pursuing court cases, contacting the FBI, fighting for his marriage or negotiating custody. Although the book occasionally mentions dates, legal cases and letters, the chronological sequence of its events often seems muddled.
A ruminative but sometimes-confusing memoir.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615664842
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Paul Ventura
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
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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