A memorable hybrid of heartfelt memoir and fond commemoration framed in Caribbean history, familial turmoil, and...
A journalist reflects on his New Jersey childhood and the nurturing Jamaican nanny who raised him.
Urken’s resonant debut memoir doubles as a biographical tribute to Dezna Sanderson, the “Jamaican Mary Poppins” who helped raise him for over a decade. As the doting family nanny, Sanderson emerged as the saving grace in a Jewish household fractured by dysfunction from his parents’ tumultuous “screaming matches” as well as drug addiction and mental illness. Since her arrival in 1988, Sanderson became Urken’s anchor, a sweet, sage mother figure whose own Seventh-day Adventist sumptuary laws nicely mirrored Jewish restrictions. As generous as she was in her caregiving for the author and his sister, Nicole, she remained reserved about her own background. Urken writes with clarity and intense focus about his indebtedness to Sanderson, who was “like a protective buffer,” and he shares many treasured memories of their time together. This fondness continued into his adulthood until the devastating news of Sanderson’s death in 2010. Eager to discover and honor more of her heritage, the author traveled to Jamaica. Despite tight-lipped family members, he launched a cross-cultural exploration of her life in Mahogany Hill, seeking “to find the root of her strong voice to understand my own.” Urken immersed himself in Jamaica’s history of political unrest involving the CIA’s covert military invasion of the region in the 1970s and the ensuing economic destabilization, which sabotaged the Sanderson family’s pineapple plantation. Many fled the region, and Sanderson, despite birthing eight children, wound up on the Urkens’ doorstep. A family visit to Sanderson’s gravesite forms one of the memoir’s more poignant scenes. The author’s memories and descriptions of Sanderson are aptly adulatory in honoring a cherished, compassionate caregiver who, in large part, is responsible for the man he has become today.
A memorable hybrid of heartfelt memoir and fond commemoration framed in Caribbean history, familial turmoil, and unconditional maternal love.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-976-828-604-8
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
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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