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Sky Woman Lives In Me

Name: Sky Woman Lives In Me
Author: Roberta Capasso
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4346-1

by Roberta Capasso ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2016

An authentic story of Native American culture, inheritance, and loss.

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A debut memoir of a woman discovering her Native American heritage and coming to terms with an ancestor’s history at an “Indian school.”

Capasso tells two stories here: one about her own learning process as she researched the history of her Oneida culture, and the other about her great-grandmother’s time as part of a 19th-century government policy of forced assimilation. She recounts a childhood of “look[ing] Oneida on the outside” but having no connection to her culture and no knowledge of Native American history beyond the depictions she saw in Westerns. As an adult, she collected stories of her great-grandmother Sophia, who was sent from an Oneida reservation in Wisconsin to Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1891, and then to a rural New Jersey farm where she spent a decade as a servant. Capasso writes about her years of research into Sophia’s experience. She traveled to Carlisle, Pennsylvania; visited the school, now preserved, in part, as a museum; and found Sophia in the school’s records. She also met with descendants of the family for whom Sophia worked, combining their stories with her grandmother’s memories to build a full picture of a silenced heritage. The author does an excellent job of drawing connections between the past and present, demonstrating that topics often relegated to history books remain relevant in family memory. Readers familiar with Native American history may be nonplussed by Capasso’s depiction of her gradual education (“I had no idea that a reservation was land set aside by the US government for Indians to live on”), and the book’s breathless tone, with 89 exclamation points in 122 pages, can be grating. That said, Capasso has created a true portrait of a non-historian’s encounter with history, bringing a valuable perspective to the generational impact of assimilationist policies.

An authentic story of Native American culture, inheritance, and loss.

Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4346-1

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Lulu

Review Posted Online: July 17, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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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.