Sharply written but painful and emotionally draining, with few moments of reprieve.
An aging father-in-law comes to stay with life-changing consequences in this memoir by Boerner (The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee, 2016).
When the unexpectedly shrill ringtone of the cellphone belonging to the author’s husband, John, jars the couple’s morning, Boerner knew instinctively that something was wrong. John’s mother, Pauline, had been admitted to the hospital, leaving his 90-year-old father, Gene, alone at home. Boerner suggests to her husband that he drive to Arkansas to collect his father so he can stay at their house in Dallas “for a few days.” Gene’s stay lasts for six weeks, a period in which Boerner, senior vice president of the commercial lending department at a Dallas bank, spends time assisting her father-in-law with his daily needs as John’s only sister looks after the hospitalized Pauline. Gene struggles with the stairs, is frustrated by the way Boerner organizes his pills, accuses Boerner’s son of stealing his wallet, and becomes increasingly confused. However, Boerner, who as a young girl wanted to be a nurse, forms a bond with Gene. She confides in Gene that she would like to write a book someday, to which Gene responds sagely: “someday gets here fast. Before long, we’ll both be nothing but memories.” The memoir hinges on this moment, which inspires Boerner to quit her job and become a writer, but the bulk of the narrative focus is on the sad decline in health of her father-in-law. As proven in her stirring debut novel, Boerner is a thoughtfully descriptive writer: “[Gene] stops counting and takes a forced breath, his exhalation so heavy I imagine wisps of his soul escaping into our home.” However, the tone of this particular offering is so relentlessly melancholic that it makes for a difficult read: “Gene will die because his time on earth has been filled to overflowing…raising children and being kind, and loving one woman to such an extent that he withered without her.” Those caring for an ailing elderly family member will recognize the gamut of emotions expressed in this tender tribute to an inspirational relative—moments of frustration, helplessness, and heartache—but this book will struggle to draw a wider audience because of its depressing nature.
Sharply written but painful and emotionally draining, with few moments of reprieve.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-951418-00-7
Page Count: 349
Publisher: One Mississippi Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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