A collection of anecdotes in the classic sense: happenings meant to thrill and entertain.
A debut memoir recounts an assortment of personal tales.
Life, as some view it, is just an accumulation of days, each an adventure (and story) of its own. That’s certainly how McFarland presents his life in this episodic book, each chapter concentrating on a day in which something eventful happened: “The Day We Sparked A Riot In Fargo North Dakota”; “The Day We Lost Ten Grand At The Hollywood Sign”; “The Day They Tried To Kill Us In Arkansas.” Four of his tales relate to his time after college working for the Forest Service in the woods of northern Idaho, which included roping a bear to a railroad tie (only to have the animal climb a tree, the tie dangling beneath it) and dragging a cement mixer up the side of a mountain. Later experiences involved the author fishing for sharks in his underwear in the waters off Trinidad, running with the bulls in Pamplona (“What I remember most was the screaming”), taking a “multi-thousand”-mile detour on a road trip with a spider monkey in the car, and hitching a ride on a plane at a snowed-in airfield in North Dakota that nearly crashed as soon as it took off. Perhaps most notably, there was the time that the author was helping to produce a country music TV special in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his wife was supposedly hit on by none other than Johnny Cash. (When McFarland asked her about it, she said, guilelessly, “Who’s Johnny Cash?”) What did the author learn from all this? It’s hard to say. As he writes in his first chapter, “Life is a delightful…storm of random events, most of which are stumbled into, make little sense and teach Life Lessons in the same way one learns from getting hit with a board.” McFarland’s prose is colorful and conversational, filled with sharp details and wonderfully evocative asides: “My bunk mates were an eclectic bunch…among others, a Nez Perce kid who swore he was related to Chief Joseph (related or not, he had both a lazy grin and a cousin scarred from hairline to chin who staggered in one night, produced a rifle and announced he was going to kill us all).” These are stories for a hotel bar or around the campfire, barely altered from the oral format in which they undoubtedly originally existed. Some pieces work better than others, and these tend to be those from the author’s younger days traveling across the American West in search of work, love, or good times. As with all big fish tales, there’s a certain amount of exaggeration and self-mythologizing. McFarland and his companions often come across as a bit larger-than-life, and there is more than a little self-satisfaction discernible in the author’s tone. But these elements are inherent to the genre, and the right readers (perhaps of a certain generation) should thoroughly enjoy these feats of boldness, chaos, wit, and luck.
A collection of anecdotes in the classic sense: happenings meant to thrill and entertain.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-124-6
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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