A deep, vibrant recollection of a fascinating life lived in tumultuous times.
A debut memoir places the author’s personal history in the panoramic context of world events.
Memoirs have a tendency to collapse, failing to provide a justification to readers as to why they should care about the details of a particular life. Diamant weaves her own autobiography into the fabric of world history, furnishing a sweeping account of the troubled past of Yugoslavia. Having grown up in postwar Yugoslavia under Tito’s rule, the author portrays a nation struggling to discover, or invent, its identity. Diamant’s reflections on socialism, an ideology she eventually, if only partially, rebelled against, are philosophically provocative: “From the start, I was buffeted by contradictory influences. Socialism implanted in us notions of equality and justice for all, while everyday life demanded to either live accordingly or skirt those ideals.” She eventually left her homeland to study in West Germany, met an American in Munich whom she married, and moved to San Francisco, a hotbed of cultural vitality, in the 1970s. There, Diamant found her bearings as an artist, a development she doubted would have been possible if she hadn’t moved to the U.S. The author’s account includes nearly as much biographical information about her mother and grandmother as it does about herself, a testament to the extraordinary influences both women had upon her. (“Every child deserves a grandmother like mine,” Diamant writes. “She was never effusive, but everything said was meant and true.”) The author’s writing is clear and sharp, and her vivid anecdotal reports of her life are typically accompanied by meditative reflections on a wide range of issues, from geopolitics to poverty. The book describes her childhood as “poor but not miserable,” delivering a welcome counterpoint to Western depictions of life in postwar Yugoslavia that sensationally emphasize squalor and despair. The deaths of her mother and grandmother are poignantly discussed as transformative moments in her life, as is the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the three pillars of her self-conception. The memoir’s most satisfying aspect is the artful way the author seamlessly combines the general and the particular, making her own life a microcosm of universally relevant human dramas. In response to a postcard her uncle sent in 1938, she wrote: “What existential uncertainty—both personal and of the times.” The reader will likely feel the same about this affecting remembrance.
A deep, vibrant recollection of a fascinating life lived in tumultuous times.Pub Date: March 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-578-14200-5
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Applebite Works
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
