Emery and Carter prove lightning can strike in the same place twice: Witness this scintillating follow-up to their 1991 megabestseller, Memories. Emery (whose prime-time cable-TV show Nashville Now has 60 million viewers) reprises his humble beginnings in broadcasting at WTPR—a dusk-to-dawn 250-watter in Paris, Tennessee (pop. 5000). After broadcasting farm-to-market news at $45 a week, he began programming a Sunday morning country-music show—until his first fan letter informed him that listening to country on Sunday mornings was like eating green beans for breakfast. Switching to a gospel format featuring live services, Emery would race to the first church and set up a microphone, then speed back to the station to introduce the service. Jumping back into the station's jalopy, he'd rush to set up a mike at the next church while the first preacher was having his half hour on the air. The bulk of the narrative here, though, offers not autobiography but more of Emery's fascinating insider's anecdotes about the foibles of country-music stars; their families; the origins of their songs; and the zany behavior they use to drive away the boredom of working 300 one-nighters on the road each year. One bright episode concerns the silver-screen debut of Mel Tillis—a notorious stutterer but one of the first Nashville singers recruited by Hollywood. Facing the cameras for the first time, Tillis characteristically botched his lines with his stutter. When the furious director castigated him for improvising, the humiliated singer retired to his trailer for some liquid consolation. Meanwhile, the cast and crew convinced the director that Tillis's stutter made the line funny, and Tillis was invited back for another take: Intoxicated, he delivered his lines without hesitation—only the next morning did a sober Tillis finally declaim to perfection, stumbling over every word. Captivating, and likely to capture another top rung on bestseller lists. (For a less satisfied glance at Emery's life, see Skeeter Davis's Bus Fare to Kentucky, reviewed above.) (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13890-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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
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