Funny and easygoing, Evans reveals the little-known richness of Argentina.
Intrepid English travel writer Evans (Kiwis Might Fly, 2007, etc.) experiences Argentina’s stunningly varied expanses while indulging her girlhood desire to ride horses.
From the high desert of the northwest to the northeast falls of Iguazú to hyperenergetic Buenos Aires to Patagonia and the “end of the world,” Evans roughed it during two months of solitary travel in this vast country. As a pleasant leitmotif, she cleverly incorporates her youthful desire to learn to ride in a land where horses have played a vital role since the Spanish founder of Buenos Aires, Pedro de Mendoza, abandoned a handful of his steeds to run wild and breed on the pampas in the mid-16th century. Evans journeyed from mid-October to mid-December, during the spring in Argentina. She started with a week’s stay at a breathtaking 6,000-acre cattle estancia in Córdoba owned by an Anglo-Argentine family that arrived in the 1820s as part of a British immigration wave. She rode about the hills, drove through the Puna (the desert shared with Chile and Bolivia) and visited the Salinas Grandes. In breezy, lighthearted prose, she imparts a smattering of Argentine history. Che Guevara grew up near Córdoba, for example, and the economic collapse of 2001 left 15 million Argentines in poverty. Evans traces the conquistadors’ inroads and their decimation of the various native tribes, and relates briefly the movement by criollos (South American-born Spaniards) for independence from Spain in 1816. Darwin arrived in Argentina in 1833, and Evans frequently quotes from his observations. Evita Perón and the return of her corpse warrant a digression, as does the “dirty war” of the 1970s and ’80s that resulted in 30,000 “disappeared.” Along her amiable way, Evans encounters tango and gauchos; she even learns to castrate a calf.
Funny and easygoing, Evans reveals the little-known richness of Argentina.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-34110-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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