Reeves, with an assist from a team of strategically deployed spectacle-watchers, gets right into the raucous spirit of the Democrats' extravaganza at Madison Square Garden, picking up on everyone from Chairman Robert Strauss to 17-year-old Clare Smith, official youngest delegate, to Annie the whore who fell short of her $800 per diem expectations. It's a frenzied, hysterical circus with hundreds of private campaigns going on even as the delegates prepare to nominate the peanut farmer. Reporting on all the carefully-rigged media spontaneity, Reeves doesn't miss a beat: from the NYPD bomb-sniffing labrador, to Tom Hayden the California delegate and Tom Hayden ("the real Tom Hayden") who set up the telephone communications system, Reeves leapfrogs from podium to massage parlor to hotel suites. He will tell you all about Carter's "private section," which Reeves claims contained a little "espionage room"—the better to bug the communications systems of the other candidates. L.A. lost out on the Convention because, well, "The Democrats were convinced that the governor of California was crazy" and the word was out to keep him from the podium at all costs. The Svengali of the proceedings is Strauss who had, early on, perceived that his party required "sedation" to avoid the cantankerous divisiveness that led to flubbing it in '68 and '72. Amid the barrage of overheard, overheated conversations, many of which won't bear repeating in polite society, Reeves has time to wonder if Carter, with his ritual laying on of hands, represents some new kind of political force, if Strauss' convention—stage-managed to contain the "weirdos"—bespeaks a day when candidates and Presidents may lead via primitive symbolism. . . . Anyone who didn't get tickets for the fabulous floor show can be there via this vastly entertaining, adrenalin-rush of a book.
Pub Date: March 1, 1977
ISBN: 0151225826
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977
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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