Sweetly idiosyncratic life musings of a periodic ex-pat on the rustic side of Corfu.
Stoneley, an annual sojourner to the island of Corfu in Greece, reflects on the small stories that make up his days.
An Englishman, the author and his family discovered Corfu in the late ’70s. Here, he sets down, as if in a pocket journal, things that caught his fancy during the 25 years since. Some of the stories are short, such as brief, amateur ethnographic forays into island customs and mind-sets that Stoneley found curious and often had to fathom to make his life more comfortable as an in-comer. Some stories endure longer, or appear sporadically throughout the book, most pertaining to the purchase of a house and property in a small, seaside village. The author’s writing has a quiet quality to it; it’s modest, as if he is fashioning these recollections for himself as much as any reader. The narrative feels natural, without any sense of striving to please. The appeal of his unvarnished conversational tone comes at a price–readers will learn much more than they want to know about the state of Stoneley’s hemorrhoids, the folderol of buying a house abroad and the travails of foreign banking. But he also knows a lovely, transporting image when it bites him: carpets of wild, lilac anemones, blazing yellow oxalis, “tiny, electric blue flowers underfoot, colours in every direction” (gardening being one of Stoneley’s strong suits); the night two boys dropped by with guitar and bouzouki and played a little rooftop music, while, across the street, an outdoor movie was shown against a screen of bamboo. And he has a gratifyingly eccentric sense of humor, ruminating on the eye in his goat’s head soup as he dickers over the price of concrete, or wondering how an egg got inside a narrow-necked earthenware pot without breaking. He is content, after a couple pages, to shrug–“It remained a riddle.”
Sweetly idiosyncratic life musings of a periodic ex-pat on the rustic side of Corfu.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4196-3484-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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