Provides insight into living an authentic life without necessarily being devoted to a cause or vocation.
A former CBS newsman recalls his experiences as a journalist and spiritual seeker.
There probably aren’t many memoirs in which the author recalls everything from an arrest for hitchhiking in Wyoming and a dawn meditation at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India, to a religious epiphany in a New York subway station and writing news copy for Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Such, though, is the material that Phillips draws from in his entertaining, thoughtful memoir. “An authentic way of life does not have to be a single-minded devotion to one cause or vocation,” he writes. “It can be a way of adventure, letting yourself be blown about by the wind, exposing the mind to a wide range of experience.” Phillips’ father was an Associated Press correspondent who was “so painfully shy he apparently failed to get a decent interview on his own in three years at the London bureau.” Phillips started his journalism career as a copy boy in the CBS radio newsroom. At 32, he was hired as news editor at the Evening News. The legendary Cronkite was “unwilling to be beaten on any important story, or let any question in his own mind go unanswered,” while Rather’s “problem was that he didn’t have much to say.” A glamorous career wasn’t enough for Phillips, who was also “hungry for spiritual kicks”—hence the trip to India. The bhagwan’s teachings, he recalls, “appeared to exacerbate the worst qualities of his disciples.” Eventually, Phillips, who had divorced his first wife, married a Presbyterian minister and, at the Columbus Circle subway station, experienced what “felt like a giant can-opener...laying me open to a cataract of water that poured down and bathed my soul.” At 58, he suffered a “devastating loss” when CBS did not renew his contract. But in what he calls his “dotage,” he has taught English as a second language and found a Zen-like contentment gazing at the Hudson River. “When the wind blows over the water, what moves, the wind or the water?” he asks. “Answer: the mind moves.”
Provides insight into living an authentic life without necessarily being devoted to a cause or vocation.Pub Date: March 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938812-53-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Full Court Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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