The book’s erotic focus is a prolonged objectification of black women.
Graves recounts his efforts to address his racist upbringing and outlines his fascination with black culture.
“I am from a racist family” is the stark opening line of this tell-all about seeking sexual and professional fulfillment. Growing up in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s, Graves (English/LeMoyne-Owen College; Aesop's Fables with Colin Hay, 2017, etc.) felt the notion of white superiority “was in the very air we breathed.” As a boy, he knew that black people lived in slums and had their own water fountains and exclusive days at the zoo. He didn’t get to know any black people, though, until his school integrated when he was 11. In the years to come, Graves was increasingly drawn to African American culture, researching the African origins of blues music. He also had sex with multiple black women, who appear to be racially fetishized (“a bevy of brown-skinned beauties”). After an unfulfilling 23-year marriage to a white woman, he writes, “I wanted to make up for what I considered lost time,” and “black women seemed to find me more attractive and interesting.” He met Fatima Magoro, from Sierra Leone, through Match.com. Despite his uneasiness over her inconsistent accounts of her past, he got her a fiancee visa for the U.S. Her existing pregnancy by another man nearly derailed the relationship, but after Fatima’s abortion they proceeded with a volatile relationship that lasted six years. The book’s sudden ending positions this experience as the pivotal one of the author’s life: “I will never know if she truly loved me,” he laments in conclusion. His experience of teaching seventh-grade creative writing makes for lively material, breaking up what can otherwise be a slightly dull chronological tour through the author’s life story. A classroom setting that initially appeared to be “the third circle of hell” gradually became a place where he had meaningful everyday encounters with minority students. Unfortunately, the overall effect here is a cataloging of black women's physical features that reads like racial stereotyping.
The book’s erotic focus is a prolonged objectification of black women.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942531-31-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: DeVault-Graves Agency
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
