An incisive, amusing, and thoroughly engrossing account of working in a former Soviet republic.
A Peace Corps volunteer spends two years teaching English in Moldova in this debut memoir.
When Weiss first arrived in Riscani, a city in northern Moldova, the outlook appeared bleak. Emerging from an alley of vodka bars packed tight with track-suited afternoon drinkers, he eyeballed his first major landmark: “the ruined brick skeleton of an asylum burned down by an angry mob some years back.” The second landmark he saw was a statue of Lenin. Despite having gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova still displayed its ties to that nation. Weiss took up residence with a Moldovan family and began teaching English at the Russian School, made infamous by its reputation for “undisciplined children.” At first, lessons were impossible. Weiss’ students preferred talking among themselves, mocking him, or leaving the classroom without permission. On one occasion, pupils started a fire causing the school to be evacuated; on another, a boy brought a pistol to class. In time, Weiss began to acclimatize. As a teacher, he made a minor breakthrough when a student asked him to translate a pop song into English, albeit rather embarrassingly the lyrics to Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.” On the street, the author discovered that he would be treated as less of an outsider if he snacked on sunflower seeds as he walked. This is an inspiring memoir about forging cross-cultural bonds against daunting odds. The country that Weiss lived in was, in many ways, mysterious to him. But through tenacity, patience, and the help of the locals, he slowly found his way. Weiss’ writing displays an understated, world-weary wit. He deftly describes Teacher’s Day, a Russian tradition, when students recite poems, dance, and serve shots of vodka and cognac to honor their instructors. Recounting the following day, Weiss remembers he was nursing a hangover and wryly confides: “I stayed out of the teachers’ room because we were expected to finish the leftover cognac during the breaks between classes.” More could have been said about Moldova’s Soviet past and how it shaped its present—surprisingly, the word “communism” is used just once in the entire book (and “communist” only three times). But the author’s two years in Moldova are a delight to follow and could prove inspiring to anyone hoping to discover other cultures as a Peace Corps volunteer.
An incisive, amusing, and thoroughly engrossing account of working in a former Soviet republic.Pub Date: June 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925536-50-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Everytime Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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