by Susan Charkes illustrated by Mary Patten Priestley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2013
A charming, thought-provoking walk in the woods.
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Charkes (Outdoors With Kids—Philadelphia, 2013, etc.) shares a collection of countryside-inspired essays, many previously published.
This compilation opens with a thoughtful examination of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, history as seen through the art of 19th-century folk painter Edward Hicks and the writings of William Penn. In this essay, Charkes suggests an essential human need to connect with nature (“Through wildness comes peace”). Most people, she says, are disconnected: “For many of us, we have to take a car to get to a place that looks anything like…country.” She then suggests a course of action: “To know the wild, look from where you are, listen from where you stand. Here and now.” Each chapter begins with pretty, relevant black-and-white illustrations by artist Priestley, who also provided the color cover art. Each of four chapters is devoted to a particular season, followed by an epilogue featuring the haunting song of the veery, a small bird that the author notes is still audible in the increasingly urban landscape. She pays careful attention to natural elements in a world where small farms “still form part of the fabric of the landscape, but nowadays they are embroidery, no longer the warp and woof of a living rural culture.” The carefully crafted, engaging essays seamlessly interlace Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau quotations with the unforeseen and whimsical. Charkes links the legendary Boston Red Sox player Carl Yastrzemski with the lowly dandelion flower and describes butterflies as doing “the insect equivalent of a pub crawl from one flowerhead to another.” With its minute, local detail, Charkes’ musings and gentle queries will resonate with all readers who wonder about the value of flowers and birdsong in an increasingly urban world.
A charming, thought-provoking walk in the woods.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615902142
Page Count: 170
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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