A modern apologetic that exuberantly uses the flourishes of memoir.
A lifetime of dissatisfaction with Evangelicalism leads a contrarian Christian intellectual to the Catholic faith in this spiritually focused memoir.
Williams (The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success, 2006) grew up in Michigan in the 1950s and ’60s as a Free Methodist, a formal denomination of Evangelicalism practiced rigidly by his abusive mother in an effort to avoid the world’s evils, from communism to Catholicism. But like his grandmother, who had adventured in India as a missionary, young Stan had a restless spirit, one that became more dogged in defiance of his mother and was bolstered further through his college studies in Christian existentialism, physics, and philosophy. Sampling numerous conflicting doctrines in churches and parachurches across the country, he remained spiritually unsettled by each denomination’s cherry-picking from the Bible, lack of unwavering moral doctrine, and an unwillingness to embrace the more charismatic and artistic aspects of worship. His evangelical faith exhausted, he skeptically, and without the support of his family, turned to Catholicism, using his own version of the scientific method (rooted perhaps too heavily in biblical anecdotes for some) to test and eventually embrace the religion his mother once vilified. Williams’ heavily conservative memoir, often overtaken by a tangible excitement, forgoes linear narrative and charmingly backtracks at times as if the momentum of the story has gotten ahead of the storyteller. The author uses lists to help organize the large amount of interdenominational information and employs a wry sense of humor and regular, comical hyperbole (“My teeth began to grind. Layers of enamel fell from my mouth into my open bible’s binding”) to keep things from becoming too dry. Williams has an impressively varied work history—training astronauts, photographing automobiles, and filmmaking. The heavy focus on Evangelicalism’s shortcomings, however, often obscures his other interests. Friends, co-workers, even the author’s three children are largely regulated to background roles, unless needed to provide a revelation or a barricade on his journey to Catholicism.
A modern apologetic that exuberantly uses the flourishes of memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9824058-8-8
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Nineveh's Crossing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
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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