Full of tantalizing tidbits for ’60s junkies, but too scattershot and awkward to merit a wide audience.
One of Bob Dylan’s former paramours remembers Greenwich Village in the ’60s.
Rotolo begins with a chronicle of her adolescence in Queens, where her education in folk and protest music began with her working-class Italian parents. “Most of us were children of Communists or socialists,” she writes, “red-diaper babies raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger.” The author graduated from high school at the age of 16 and spent the remainder of her teen years working odd jobs, hanging out in Washington Square Park and building an interest in politics, music, literature, art and especially theater (particularly Bertolt Brecht). When a planned move to Rome was indefinitely postponed after the author suffered a violent car crash, Rotolo began attending classes at the School of Visual Arts and taking jobs building sets and props for small-theater productions. She gradually became more active in the Village’s burgeoning political and cultural scene and attended concerts at venues including the Bitter End, Café Wha? and the Gaslight. Rotolo—the woman featured on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—first saw Dylan on stage at Gerde’s Folk City in 1961, and the two formed a quick bond. Rotolo insightfully noted the musician’s “uncanny ability to complicate the obvious and sanctify the banal—just like a poet.” Unfortunately, many of the author’s other observations about this tumultuous time period fail to capture the zeitgeist of the era. (A short anecdote about Charles Mingus, however, accurately portrays the jazz musician’s notoriously stormy temperament.) In language that is occasionally poetic, but more often bland and stilted, Rotolo meanders through her memories, stopping to comment on the endless procession of quirky characters that made that specific time and place so special: John Lee Hooker, Dave Van Ronk, Izzy Young, Albert Grossman, Tiny Tim, Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy) and countless others. Dylan receives better treatment, and Rotolo offers a carefully considered assessment of the mercurial musician’s work, personality and many faults (“Bob was charismatic; he was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole”).
Full of tantalizing tidbits for ’60s junkies, but too scattershot and awkward to merit a wide audience.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2687-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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