Werth’s debut about her battle with breast cancer is a mix of prose and poetry that’s part autobiography, part memoir, part journal and part self-help guide for others facing similar “faith walks.”
On a particularly sunny, life-affirming spring day, Werth drove to her dentist’s office with the sunroof open, had her teeth cleaned, unexpectedly ran into her radiologist of the past 20 years, ran errands, went hiking with friends, enjoyed a picnic lunch, had a “serendipitous routine” mammography, was forced by traffic to run over a woodchuck and learned she had stage III, triple-negative breast cancer—an especially aggressive subtype of the disease. It was, as they say, the best of times and the worst of times rolled into one 24-hour period of the 62-year-old’s life. Her reaction to the news was to do what she’s always done at seminal moments in her life—to write. The words flowed throughout her “frightening and unfamiliar” journey into breast cancer. A self-described realist, Werth jumps right on the “Cancer Express” and takes the reader along for the visceral ride. She writes, “I must go forward…I cannot avoid the inevitable…It is what it is (one of my favorite clichés). The woodchuck is dead, and I have cancer.” Willing to have those difficult discussions about the “c” word, Werth goes to the places and topics most people refuse to visit. But this is not a tale of doom and gloom. Yes, there is fear, doubt and momentary anger, but those emotions are accompanied by hope, humor and gratitude as Werth discovers how to live in the moment and find the beauty, fragrance and delight of every day on Earth. Werth’s at her literary best in the prose sections; her recollections of her grandmother, who had “two radical mastectomies” 53 years earlier, quickly draw the reader in thanks to vivid images of the people, places and scars of that faraway time. Less enjoyable are Werth’s forays into poetry. It’s not that she’s not a good writer; it’s that the poems seem disjointed, incongruent and sometimes random. While traveling through the prose is a smooth, easy ride, venturing through the poems can feel cumbersome and laborious. For those on their own unfamiliar, scary voyage with cancer, this book will likely inspire, comfort and perhaps motivate them to journal their way through the disease.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1929581009
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Creative Energies
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
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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