A compelling and often funny account of growing up in one of America’s Korean enclaves.
A writer shares anecdotes from her youth in Los Angeles County’s Korean American community in this debut memoir.
The child of South Korean immigrants, Koo, along with her siblings, was forced to abide by certain traditional customs when she was growing up. This included respecting elders, like her grandmother, even when their behavior was somewhat bizarre: “Without our permission, my dad’s mom rampaged through our house with a pair of silver shears, grabbing and cutting pieces of our clothing, big blankets, and any available patches of fabric….She took those pieces of old and new fabric to make oddly-patched small pillow covers.” Sometimes this traditional Korean worldview was shocked by the reality of the family’s American surroundings: Koo’s father’s first gas station was on Crenshaw Boulevard in South Central LA, and a few months after he sold it, the building was set on fire during the city’s riots in 1992. But there was no shortage of other Koreans in LA County, and Koo’s childhood was an often hilarious clash between her American-born peers and her parents’ immigrant generation. At the center of it all, there was always a table laden with traditional food: jeon, bibimbap, banchan, bulgogi, and even the Korean adaptation of the American hamburger (or hambegeo, as the author’s mother called it). Koo’s prose is conversational and amusing, managing to make both Korean and American cultures appear simultaneously alien and familiar: “Ken had long bangs that dangled to the sides of his chin. He was a young eleventh grade ‘wangsta,’ a wannabe gangsta, who wore baggy clothes….He often went to noraebangs to drink, smoke, and sing the latest Korean songs with his fellow wangsta friends, and sometimes he got into trouble.” The book is a thoroughly enjoyable coming-of-age tale of a somewhat precocious girl finding her way in a particularly loud and chaotic environment where the old and the new rested side by side and not always comfortably. Additionally, the work captures a specific time and place in the history of LA and the so-called “Third Wave” of immigration to the United States.
A compelling and often funny account of growing up in one of America’s Korean enclaves.Pub Date: June 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9907750-1-0
Page Count: 202
Publisher: SPICES Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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