A thought-provoking, if somewhat limited, exploration of race relations.
In this debut memoir, a white Southerner uses his own life experiences to explore race and racism in the United States.
In mid-20th-century Orlando, Florida, Mullen had virtually no personal relationships with African-American people. Although he was uncomfortable with the casual racism that he observed in some friends and family members, he rarely spoke out about it. Indeed, he says that he was frequently confounded by the contradictions of his fellow Southerners. His friend’s father, for instance, claimed to have committed a heinous act of racist violence, but he also supportively mentored a black employee; Mullen’s grandmother was a Christian woman who greeted the news of the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by saying, “Good, I hope he dies.” The author’s understanding of race, he says, was largely based in the world of sports, where his admiration for such heroes as Hank Aaron was mixed with confusion: Aaron’s “life was perfect,” the author thought, “so why was he complaining about racism?” By the time Mullen graduated from high school in the mid-1970s, he’d only conversed with one African-American person, but his entry into the Army changed that. During his basic training and later service in Germany, he was in close contact with black contemporaries, and he found their exchanges enlightening; the “Room” of the title is his German quarters, which he shared with five other soldiers—four black and one white. Mullen voices common misapprehensions and insecurities of white people who have little contact with people of color, such as why some black people use the N-word but abhor its use by others. (Indeed, this word seems to appear in the text more often than absolutely necessary.) Readers may think that some statements, such as “I could sense the black person size me up and…give me a passing grade on their personal bigotry scale,” seem naïve and self-aggrandizing. However, Mullen does capture some truths about the fear and guilt that prevents many white people from easily confronting the topic of racism. It’s disappointing, though, when he notes that his later life included few real friendships with African-Americans.
A thought-provoking, if somewhat limited, exploration of race relations.Pub Date: March 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997023-1-4
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Ruebob Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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