An energetic, candid remembrance of the compelling moments that shape a young reporter’s career.
An American in Europe plans an overland trip to India to kick-start a career in journalism in this travel memoir.
Buck’s (East, 2013, etc.) colorful autobiography serves as a sequel to her previous book and begins in 1972 as she returns to Germany after a memorable trek to Nepal. She stayed with a friend in West Berlin, an island inside of Soviet East Germany. From the elevated train, she could see the entire city, and on the platforms were intimidating East German guards. Nonetheless, she enjoyed her new friends in the metropolis and the vibrant student community. After a particularly cold winter, she secured a teaching job at an American military base in southern Germany, but her wanderlust still ran strong. Intrigued by the peaceful nature of Swedish society, she soon found herself in Stockholm and got a marvelous introduction to Scandinavian culture. Unfortunately, she could only secure menial work, though somehow she studied free at the university. It hadn’t been that long since she returned from Asia, but she realized that “sometimes a new journey begins when we least expect it.” Deciding on a future as a journalist, she threw a camera and an old Olivetti typewriter into her knapsack and set off for a return trip to India to learn about child care practices in Asia. She traveled in a VW bus driven by a man named Jürgen, and their destination was Gandhi’s ashram and, later, Goa. She was seeking to observe and report and maybe promote some cross-cultural understanding, unaware of how difficult the trip would be physically and of the looming political crisis about to grip India. As a follow-up, Buck’s journey is never a dull one, as she hops around Europe and Asia, discovering such wonders as a youth hostel on a ship in Sweden and mirrored cloth and tie-dye skirts in Rajasthan. The sights and sounds are impressive (at one point, she and Jürgen drive over the Khyber Pass), and her resourcefulness and knowledge are invaluable when traveling with limited funds. The quest to begin journalistic work evolves slowly, sometimes taking a back seat to health and travel issues. But the effort to understand other cultures with an eye toward women’s rights is vividly described.
An energetic, candid remembrance of the compelling moments that shape a young reporter’s career.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73352-200-7
Page Count: 261
Publisher: WriteWords Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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