A book of sorrows—and of surpassing importance.
Avowed integrationist Irons (Political Science/UC San Diego; A People’s History of the Supreme Court, not reviewed) powerfully summarizes Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and argues compellingly that subsequent court cases have effected resegregation and the resurrection of Jim Crow.
The author grieves for what he views as the abandonment of the ideals of equal educational opportunity so eloquently advanced in 1954 by Thurgood Marshall and so painfully sought by children, parents, teachers, and even a few courageous politicians. Irons begins his damning indictment of retreat and racism with a swift history of the “education” of slaves (whites sometimes punished those uppity blacks who dared to write by cutting off the offending digits). He proceeds with a case-by-case examination of the Supreme Court’s handling of issues relating to racially segregated schools. For a brief time, Irons sees the Court endeavoring to guarantee to black Americans what the Constitution requires. Although he admires the political skills of Chief Justice Earl Warren (who achieved a 9-0 consensus among his colleagues on Brown), he regrets the concession to Southerners Warren was forced to accept, which permitted the phrase “all deliberate speed” to become a speed-bump of alpine proportions on the road to social progress. Irons reminds us that significant achievements like Brown and the integration of Little Rock schools were accompanied by substantial white resistance and violence, which went on for years, nowhere more brutally than in Boston’s anti-busing riots. Two portions of the story are particularly wrenching and depressing: the Supreme Court’s turn to the right courtesy of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush I, resulting in subsequent abatements of Brown; and the author’s recent visits to the five schools whose cases were clustered as Brown. In all of them, Irons found de facto segregation, and no better evidence exists for the failures of today’s educational policy than his poignant interviews with current students.
A book of sorrows—and of surpassing importance.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-88918-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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