In sonorous, often autobiographical terms, these essays (reprinted from speeches and articles originally published between 1963-83) survey the role of the artist in society, the role of society in fiction, and the relationship of black cultural values to American myths and the American dream. The tone is judicious throughout, though Ellison remains very much a spokesman for his own generation—a group for whom slavery was a memory as immediate as memories of grandparents. The essays are often rooted in recollections of the 1930's—his years as a music student at Tuskegee and, somewhat later, as an ambivalent New Yorker committing himself to a literary life ("the writing of novels is the damndest thing I ever got into"). There is no apparent theory or method here—just a meticulous marshalling of memories, facts, and measured conclusions. One of the strongest essays is a tribute to Richard Wright, whom Ellison decided to meet after reading a poem by Wright while still at Tuskegee. Visiting New York at the same time that Wright was transferred from Chicago to New York (as editor of the magazine New Challenge and Harlem bureau reporter for The Daily Worker), Ellison not only got to know this uncompromising, troubled genius, but was one of the few to read Native Son in manuscript: "I didn't know what to think of it except that it was wonderful. I was not responding critically. After all, how many of you have had the privilege of reading a powerful novel as it was, literally, ripped off the typewriter?" Ellison later developed critical reservations about ideological bias in Wright's fiction, but the essay expresses them without detracting from Wright's enormous achievement. Curiously, another very fine essay is on a writer who must be the antipode of Wright—the novelist Erskine Caldwell. Ellison is no ideologue. Indeed, some of the reprinted speeches might have been better edited to remove glowing references to then-reigning presidents (including Richard Nixon). These flattering comments were probably graceful in context but out of context sound vaguely sycophantic. It's the only awkwardness in an otherwise magisterial performance.
Pub Date: July 23, 1986
ISBN: 0679760016
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
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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