A useful sourcebook and an entertaining read.
This nonfiction collection offers more than 50 entertaining, informative memoir pieces about American girlhood from 1910 to 2010.
Sherman (Lesbian and Gay Marriage, 1992) taught memoir writing for many years. Many of these entries were written by her students, while others were adapted from interviews with women and girls from diverse cultural, geographical, racial, and class backgrounds. Sherman asked her interviewees about their first 13 years and specifically about their experiences with family, school, friendships, and play; other topics include “racism, divorce, [and] being ‘different.’ ” Readers will see the differences, similarities, and connections within and across decades as they compare and contrast other childhoods with their own. Each chapter has a useful introduction explaining the historical characteristics of a particular decade, including its newest products, books, and similar artifacts, and the 10 most popular girls’ names. There’s much food for thought here, whether readers focus on a single decade or trace themes over time, such as the immigrant experience, how appliances have eased household chores, or how expectations regarding girls’ dress, schooling, and careers have changed. Some cultural experiences serve as common touchstones through the years (such as reading Louisa May Alcott’s works); others are very much of their time, such as accompanying the iceman on his deliveries. Overall, the contributions are wonderfully lively and vivid. Here, Florence Smith—5 years old in 1911—describes the excitement of her family buying the first Model T on the block: “Neighbors up the street came outside to see us, and they waved as we passed. My mother was laughing and hugging my father as we bounced along and I was feeling the air move through my fingers with both hands held up.” Readers inclined to take modernity for granted will find much here to surprise and interest them. As the first in a planned series of “100 Years in the Life” books, it also has great classroom potential with its discussion questions.
A useful sourcebook and an entertaining read.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9904527-2-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: SZS Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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