Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining...
The life and times of America’s other border.
The southern border of the United States gets all the attention, but it’s barely half as long as the northern border; its story is “a tale of early mistakes, and more than two centuries of fixes.” Fox (Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, 2013), a Maine native (he now lives in New York) and editor of the travel journal Nowhere, took a coast-to-coast, two-year journey weaving in and out of a boundary that, “on paper, looks like a discarded thread—twisted and kinked in parts, tight as a bowstring in others,” to see it firsthand and to recount its rich history. He didn’t make an itinerary: “I packed a canoe, tent, maps, and books and headed for the line.” He began one chilly October morning in Lubec, America’s easternmost border town near Passamaquoddy Bay. In June 1604, writes the author, Frenchman Samuel de Champlain entered the bay with two large boats and a crew of 150 to begin his own exploring. Throughout, Fox chronicles in detail Champlain’s adventures, good and bad, as well as those of many other explorers and adventurers from the border’s past. This gives the book an added richness, providing helpful historical context to the places the author visits. Early on, Fox’s trip almost ended when he nearly capsized a small outboard boat in high waves in below-freezing Sandy Bay. He recounts that in 1775, the Continental army attempted a doomed invasion of Canada, and in the 1920s and ’30s, a U.S. planning committee even “drew up plans to seize Canada.” In Montreal, Fox hitched a ride on a “moving skyscraper,” the freighter Equinox, as he traversed the Great Lakes. In eastern North Dakota, he got caught up in Indian protests over the oil pipeline.
Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining and informative travel literature.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24885-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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