An uneven collection in which too many parts read more like a journeyman’s records of where he’s been and what he’s seen...
A disparate, often disappointing collection of essays on place and time, enlivened by the inclusion of pertinent excerpts from the writings of E.B. White.
Root (English Language and Literature Emeritus/Central Michigan Univ.; Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, 2009, etc.) brings together 13 pieces of nature writing, 11 of which have previously been published in somewhat different form in various literary publications. The author is clearly a great admirer of White, devoting four of his pieces to that author. Unfortunately, his own writing pales in comparison to that of one of the masters of creative nonfiction. Root’s focus on the mundane details of his travels around Great Pond in Maine keeps his work from having the emotional impact of White’s account of returning as a father to a lake he had first known as a son. A similar problem occurs with an essay in which Root quotes liberally from White’s witty rhyming book review of Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. Root tells of his tour of Malabar Farm State Park in Ohio and provides some history of the place and of its novelist owner’s ideas on farming, but it is White’s review in verse that stays in the mind. Root’s musings on time and place come into their own in Chaco Canyon and in the tides and heavy fogs of Acadia National Park, where the history of the land is preserved in the names of tribes and colonists. The author is even sharper when he writes about Florida, where the absence of clear seasons can delude one into thinking that time has stood still.
An uneven collection in which too many parts read more like a journeyman’s records of where he’s been and what he’s seen than the work of a longtime teacher of the art of literary nonfiction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3846-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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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