`There is a lot of sadness in this [book] because the best stories in the newspaper are those of people in trouble,` Bragg...
A collection of did-you-hear-about-the-person-who articles by a Pulitzer-winning New York Times feature reporter.
`I keep thinking,` writes Rick Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin’, 1997), `that someday I will not have to write about race, about hatred. I keep thinking that.` There are a lot of such thoughts in this anthology of the features Bragg has published over the last 13 years, primarily as Miami bureau chief for the New York Times. Alabama-raised but now Florida-based, Bragg’s journalistic territory ranges as far north as the streets and projects of Brooklyn and as far west as the plains and oilfields of Texas; Southern sense and sensibility pervades his reporting throughout, without compromising its integrity or limiting its appeal. More than half of these 64 features focus in some fashion or other upon the stories and plight of America’s least wanted: in Miami we are introduced to the Shantytown homeless (who hope for little more in the way of shelter than dry cardboard); in New Orleans we meet the children who live at the St. Thomas housing project (and are looked upon as survivors if they succeed in turning 13); and in Brooklyn we are given a brief tour of the bodegas (whose owners live in constant hope that their next customer won’t bear fatal tender). Here again are the acts once unimaginable and now seemingly commonplace, here again are the names and places that became familiar: Oklahoma City; Susan Smith; Jasper, Texas. A welcome third of the stories have lighter subjects: a sweet-tea brew-off, Cajun Christmas traditions in the Mississippi delta, and Oseola McCarthy (the washwoman who accumulated a small fortune and gave it all to the University of Alabama).
`There is a lot of sadness in this [book] because the best stories in the newspaper are those of people in trouble,` Bragg warns. Journalists, sociologists, and psychologists will find much in Bragg’s observations to consider and reconsider. Most readers will, too.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8173-1027-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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