by Robert Coles & edited by Trevor Hall & Vicki Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 31, 2010
Intelligent observations about an array of important writers and worthy reflections on leading a more thoughtful existence,...
Pulitzer Prize winner Coles (Psychiatry and Medical Humanities/Harvard Medical School; Political Leadership, 2005, etc.) spotlights artists who guide us toward moral and social awareness.
Transcribed and edited from recordings of lectures for “A Literature of Social Reflection,” a course the author taught for two decades, the text has a casual, intimate tone. Coles frequently offers personal reminiscences, seeking to encourage students to connect literature with “the hidden curriculum we have before us over the decades of our existence. By this I mean not a subject matter that is intellectual in nature but one experiential and moral in nature. Indeed, he spends a lot of time taking potshots at intellectuals—himself as a younger man included—who avoid emotional engagement with art (and life) by overanalyzing and putting everything into academic categories. Though his central questions are the biggies—“How does one live a life? What kind of life? And for what purpose?”—Coles prefers writers who grapple with these questions on the level of daily detail and texture: William Carlos Williams, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston. (The author looks glances back at the Victorians, but his primary concern is with 20th-century literature.) Even when dealing with works generally evaluated as political statements, such George Orwell’s writings, he focuses on the authors’ personal relationship with the material, the way they challenge us to look into our own hearts for the sources of injustice and prejudice. That is also the Coles’s agenda, but with a distasteful twist. He assumes his students, and readers, are privileged people whose privileges are largely invisible to them, who must be goaded to acknowledge their human kinship with the poor, the ignorant and the oppressed rather than merely pitying them. This stance can be irritating, especially when the author parades his superior sensitivity under the guise of personal anecdotes.
Intelligent observations about an array of important writers and worthy reflections on leading a more thoughtful existence, delivered with an off-putting undercurrent of self-satisfaction.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6203-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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