An unrelentingly shallow biography of the decathlete and physician who founded the Gay Games, incorporating extensive chunks of Waddell's diary from the last five years of his life. The prolific Schaap (Steinbrenner!, 1982, etc.) interviewed Waddell at length before his death from AIDS in 1987. The result, after an unexplained nine-year delay, is in essence an uncritical third-person autobiography. Waddell was born Tom Flubacher in New Jersey in 1937. His unhappy family disintegrated when he was young, and by his mid-teens he had moved in with a supportive couple whose name he took. A lousy student, Waddell squeaked his way through college on an athletic scholarship and went on to medical school while competing in track and field events. In 1966 he was drafted; to avoid Vietnam, Waddell registered as a conscientious objector, even demonstrating against the war. In the 1968 Olympics he finished sixth in the decathlon. His athletic career waned, but he pursued adventurous medical postings (i.e., accompanying Saudi royalty as a medical adviser on gambling junkets). Always aware of his homosexual leaning, Waddell came fully to terms with his sexuality in the 1970s, and People featured him and a lover in its ``Couples'' section in 1977. The Gay Games, Waddell's brainchild, were inaugurated in 1982, essentially to show that gay men and lesbians are normal because they can compete in sports as successfully as straight people; Schaap doesn't address criticisms of this fragile logic. Waddell fathered a child with a lesbian friend in 1983; his last years were occupied with his daughter, his declining health, and a protracted legal battle against the US Olympic Committee, which refused to let Waddell call his games the Gay Olympics. A complex character—compassionate, noble, but deeply troubled—sometimes peeks out, but Schaap's gee- whiz prose is as unsubtle as Waddell's diary entries addressed to his infant daughter. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-57223-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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