A vibrant, high-spirited collection that will appeal to those on one side of this complex geopolitical conundrum.
An anthology calling upon American writers to address the plight of the Palestinians.
Editor Freeman (On Sal Mal Lane, 2013, etc.) notes in her introduction, “what can and cannot be done in America is a question that carries enormous hope on the part of people who do not live here.” She casts “the impetus to ask a group of writers to reflect on the ongoing assault on the thin and shifting borders of Palestine” in historical terms, citing similar projects rooted in the tumult of 1937 and 1967. The structure is somewhat jumbled: such sections as “Erasure” or “The Un/Making of History” mix fiction, poetry, or narrative essays, while only some writers provide introductory commentary. Several well-known writers responded with older work, like novelist Colum McCann, who notes, “this might sound odd, but there is as much Gaza as Derry in this story.” In describing her poem “The Story of Joshua,” Alicia Ostricker avers, “as an American Jew...Israel/Palestine is like a weird doppelganger beating and beating alongside my own heart.” Some authors present fusions of form, such as Janne Teller’s alphabetized entry, which indexes the events leading to the current state of conflict. Other writers respond with brief essays examining one aspect of the situation—e.g., Laila Lalami’s “The Nameless Palestinian Prisoners,” which notes the refusal of Israeli newspapers to acknowledge the identities of detainees; or Kiese Laymon’s “My Mama Went to Palestine,” which recalls her mother’s lifelong study of “poverty and structural oppression.” Elsewhere, poet Naomi Shihab Nye tersely compares the deaths of children in Gaza to recollections of an idyllic childhood in Ferguson, Missouri, now known for its own unrest. Other notable contributors include Jane Hirshfield, Tess Gallagher, Leslie Jamison, Claire Messud, Alice Walker, Teju Cole, and George Saunders.
A vibrant, high-spirited collection that will appeal to those on one side of this complex geopolitical conundrum.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-682190-08-1
Page Count: 430
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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