A fine memoir about a lawyer’s fight for workers’ rights.
An attorney’s memoir of a notable case she argued on behalf of workers in American Samoa.
In a blend of personal stories, travelogue and courtroom drama, attorney Sudbury recounts a class-action lawsuit she filed on behalf of Vietnamese workers in a Samoan garment factory. The workers claimed that they found themselves in slavery-like conditions while they sewed “Made in America” labels onto clothing. The case began when several workers from the Daewoosa factory approached Sudbury and her husband to find out if they could help them recover unpaid wages. The Sudburys had settled in Samoa after several years in Baja, Calif., where they ran both a private law practice and an agency that supported abused women. Although Sudbury was initially reluctant, she agreed to take the case and became personally and emotionally involved as the challenges mounted. Daewoosa enjoyed support from the local government, and the workers had reason to believe their families in Vietnam would suffer as a result of the lawsuit. Sudbury’s frustration is palpable as she describes the pretrial process; excerpts from the courtroom transcripts make it clear to the reader that while American Samoa is, in part, governed by the laws of the United States, it’s also shaped by the local non-progressive culture. Although Sudbury and her allies fought hard for the workers’ rights, she acknowledges that the U.S. government brought real relief, by providing visas to the workers as victims of human trafficking. The government also brought criminal charges against Daewoosa’s owner that exacted a more substantial punishment than the lawsuit could. The author’s writing is engaging, if a bit unfocused at times. Sudbury sprinkles local color throughout the book, although some of the digressions on Samoan driving habits and traditional dress don’t blend seamlessly into the narrative. The story doesn’t end with a personal legal triumph, but Sudbury makes it clear in this book that she was pleased with the outcome, and changed by the experience.
A fine memoir about a lawyer’s fight for workers’ rights.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475953794
Page Count: 184
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
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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