A sobering, lucid memoir about the uncanny, precarious nature of family, masculinity and childhood.
In Berkun’s (The Year Without Pants, 2013, etc.) new memoir, a broken family in the New York metropolitan area struggles to overcome their limitations.
If there’s a keyword that unlocks Berkun’s portrait of his socially impaired clan, it’s memory. Admittedly, this isn’t an unusual observation for a memoir. Nonetheless, Berkun’s childhood recollection of his mother cleaning out her husband Howard’s car, only to discover “tickets to a movie she’d never seen,” is an affecting image of abandonment and lost innocence. “No one recalls what the movie was,” Berkun writes, “but it’s strangely important to me now.” Throughout this memoir, the 42-year-old author tells of how he’s still haunted by his childhood’s lack of stability or certainty, particularly regarding his parents’ on-again, off-again relationship. Starting at an early age, he says, he was overwhelmed by his father’s imperfections, such as his tendency “to deal privately with his wounds, to put himself first, and to deny and repress the expression of love” toward his wife and children, including the author’s older siblings. Berkun tells of how his father became involved in a second affair at the age of 70, three decades after his initial infidelity, and of how his own sad memories of youth rose again, “like the ghosts of sad creatures that died long ago, haunting me because they want to find peace but can’t.” The author’s prose style is compelling, due in part to his interest in classical mythology and modern popular culture. After explaining that his anger toward his father came from the fact that Howard never made “an attempt to explain himself,” Berkun reminisces about his first exposure to the movie Star Wars (1977) and explores the shared history of the “misunderstood monster” between Darth Vader, Dr. Frankenstein, Greek mythology and Aesop’s fables. As the story of a father who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s, Berkun’s memoir is ideally suited to an audience that’s similarly concerned with the challenges of adulthood and parenthood in the 21st century.
A sobering, lucid memoir about the uncanny, precarious nature of family, masculinity and childhood.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0983873129
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Berkun Media, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 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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