A memoir about what happens to a hyperactive kid when he grows up and becomes an airline pilot.
Debut memoirist Taylor grew up in South Carolina, matriculated at The Citadel, flew in Vietnam, and then spent a long, very satisfying career as a pilot with Delta Airlines. He didn’t achieve his dream of being a fighter pilot (for one thing, he had a very dicey stomach), but his stint in Southeast Asia piloting huge C-130 cargo planes prepared him well to fly Delta’s big jets. The book’s early chapters are pretty brutal, as upperclassmen at The Citadel screamed at him and tormented him, and then instructors in flight school did the same. But Taylor was spunky, giving as good as he got, and he loved to play practical jokes and pull pranks, such as when he tricked flight attendants into thinking a weather balloon was a UFO. Some of these pranks are funny, but others are somewhat labored in the telling. Readers have a front-row seat during harrowing landings in Vietnam, close calls flying for Delta, and other misadventures. When Taylor writes of retiring at the age of 60, saying, despite the parting festivities, that it was “one of the saddest days of my life,” readers will believe him. There are many more stories here; for example, the author sailed solo from Bermuda to North Carolina. (Taylor holds a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license and, alone and becalmed at sea, gives his inner poet free rein.) He also writes of hunting turkey and deer; raising his four kids as a single dad; his late, touching tribute to a man who taught him how to temper steel, and much more. Readers will overlook the frat-boy quality of the early high jinks, because when push came to shove, Taylor proved to be a sensitive, responsible grown-up. They will come to like Capt. Taylor very much, which is more than half the charm of a good memoir and a sign of a good memoirist. The book also includes photographs by the author.
A good read, of special interest to those who love flying.
Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9914911-0-0
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Joggling Board Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 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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