Outlandish, implausibly captivating explorations of New Jersey's untamed and godawful Meadowlands from freelance journalist Sullivan. If there's an environmental equivalent of the Inferno's sub-basement, it is the Meadowlands, the skanky place with the pretty name. Pestilence, poison, murder, mayhem—the Meadowlands are home to them all, in abundance. Come a free day, Sullivan enjoys nosing about, ``like a bad habit,'' in the toxic farrago of swamp, bog, and saltwater marsh, encountering things you would rather not know about. Bring on the Superfund cleanup sites and state remediation areas; the smoldering hills of garbage, laced with mercury and chromium, leaching their brown juices into the waterways; the obscene swarms of mosquitoes hatching in water the color of antifreeze; serve them forth, Sullivan wants a look-see. But the story isn't all vile, for there is a history here to consider, of real meadows that once supported arum and saxiflage and cedar forests, native populations and European settlers who didn't rape the terrain, and there is the host of characters smitten by the Meadowlands, with strange and curious things to tell. And Sullivan has an appealing taste for the absurd and ridiculous, the kind of material that gives places warp and weft: He floats his canoe over the submerged remains of a radio station ``thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra,'' finds the world's largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind at the Kearny Public Library, and casually observes ``the morning that Dave and I set out to dig for Jimmy Hoffa was beautiful and sunny.'' The 20th century has done its worst by the Meadowlands, but as Sullivan superbly demonstrates, there is life in the old landscape yet, a friskiness that shakes off into the clayey muck the hellspawn of progress.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83285-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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