A warm, engaging read about the ways in which memory distorts our understanding of family.
Years after the death of her father, a woman explores her family’s past in this memoir.
The genesis of Harrigan’s debut book is in her essay “Revenge of the Prey: How a Deer Killed My Dad,” published by the Rumpus in 2011, and it explores the legacy of her father, who died in a car accident in 1974 when she was 7. The title is a reference to a different accident in the early 1960s, which claimed her father’s dominant hand—a mysterious event that Harrigan worked to uncover. She realized how time had strained her own memory, so she set out to learn more about her father from her other family members only to find out that her dad may not have been the man she remembered. This is the strength of Harrigan’s book, because although her father is its central subject, it’s also about the web of relationships connected to his memory: how did the author’s brother Louis, who read Homer as a little boy for fun and grew up to become an art historian, feel about his gruff, stereotypically masculine father? Why did the author and her sister, Lynn, who was in the car when her father died, become estranged? How does the tragedy influence the author’s approach to marriage and parenting? Harrigan infuses each dynamic with style and drama that make the book consistently engaging, and her prose is lively and accessible: “I’m wearing white Keds or Salvation Army red cowboy boots in the cemetery snow, waiting for my father to rise from underground, as if he’d just been a bear in hibernation.” Her account of her relationship with her son, Noah, is a highlight, showing how he must learn to accept his own father (Harrigan’s ex-husband). However, she does have a tendency to belabor the unreliability of memory; frequently, she reminds readers of how it’s “Strange how people in my family have different pieces of memories,” as if it weren’t the book’s clear, predominant theme. Despite this redundancy, though, the book feels fresh and reads easily.
A warm, engaging read about the ways in which memory distorts our understanding of family.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61248-210-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Truman State University Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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