Barry’s upbeat attitude and clear prose make this memoir a pleasant, enjoyable read.
A real estate mogul’s good-natured memoir and guide to salesmanship.
In this book, Barry demonstrates the role that the golden rule played throughout his long, successful career. He draws a rich portrait of his childhood, during which his family moved to Missouri, Washington state and California; his parents were pursuing economic stability—and seeking to escape the social castigation caused by his father’s alcoholism. Despite his father’s binges and his mother’s emotional distance, Barry avoided serious trouble in his youth, although his school years were marked by subpar performance. Early fatherhood and marriage forced him to grow up quickly, and he resolved to do better than his parents did. Armed with a keen grasp of human nature, a finely honed set of sales skills and immense determination, Barry made the most of the opportunities that came his way. He began a real estate career in 1960 that, over the next five decades, would make him a multimillionaire. It also provided him with a keen sense of purpose, which helped him get through a handful of personal tragedies and setbacks. Although this book is nominally a memoir, the bulk of its central section focuses on successful and unsuccessful real estate deals brokered over the course of Barry’s career. His enthusiasm, genial humility and intelligent analysis keep the readability high, and he ably explains complex transactions and analyzes the character of past investment partners. Only near the end of this section does the narrative momentum flag, and Barry, seeming to understand this, switches back to more personal material. Refreshingly, the author’s honesty, a key factor in his business success, extends to his writing; he doesn’t shy away from negative aspects of his personality or his feelings about specific people, which reinforces his credibility.
Barry’s upbeat attitude and clear prose make this memoir a pleasant, enjoyable read.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985563530
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Joey Winters
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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