An often engaging portrayal of a remarkable African-American woman.
Landry (Alive with Passion and Purpose, 2009) and Boye (Prophetic Intern, 2013) tell the true story of Effie Jones, prophetess and evangelist.
Born in Baxter, La., in the early 20th century, Effie was one of five children in an African-American sharecropper’s family. Her mother, with whom she was especially close, died of tuberculosis when Effie was 7, leaving her lonely. Things got even worse when an unloving stepmother entered their family. Effie’s hours in the fields mainly profited her white boss, so she also made crossties for the railroad to make extra money, and she was outperforming the men by the time she was 17. She married Jimmy, the first of six husbands, to break away from her family and her job, and this began an odyssey that took her from place to place, and from man to man, as she tried to escape abuse and unhappiness. She eventually moved west, to California, in an attempt to start over. Throughout her life, Effie said that she was visited by spirits and angels who saved her more than once, and she never lost her faith in God despite her hardships. Effie’s touching, engrossing tale is aimed at a Christian audience that may see her experiences as parables, but it may please other readers as well—particularly those who are interested in the lives of African-Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Her later relationship with Boye offers a clear portrait of Effie in old age, but Boye has a story of her own, which includes divorced parents and an alcoholic grandmother. However, her story is less compelling than Effie’s, and some readers may wonder why the authors chose to move the spotlight away from Effie at all. Boye’s questions and promptings to Effie lead to asides and explanations that are sometimes helpful, but they’re more often unnecessary, and may pull readers out of the mood created by Effie’s fine storytelling voice.
An often engaging portrayal of a remarkable African-American woman.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0578123615
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Scott Cornelius Design & Photography
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2014
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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