Sometimes fun and often instructive, though occasionally sluggish.
Fifteen original essays of varying quality from writers who learned English as a second language and now employ it more or less full-time.
The purpose of this uneven collection, writes editor/critic Lesser (Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering, 2002, etc.), is “to uncover the sources of writing in writers I admired.” Okay. Give points, first of all, for diversity. First languages here include Bangla and Chinese, Italian and Czech, Yiddish, and Korean. Several authors believe that their native language made learning English more difficult; Koreans negotiate the first-person singular in much different fashion, notes Ha-yun Jung, and English has sounds that do not exist in Korean. Bharati Mukherjee (Bangla) envies the tenses available in English. Some of the writers, unsurprisingly, seem to have as keen an interest in promoting their books as in talking about their first language. But others present engaging ideas in finely crafted, even lovely, sentences. Bert Keizer (Dutch) admits that he initially found the writing of English to be “like trying to plough a stretch of marble,” while Luc Sante (French) avers, “Elegance and precision are necessary allies; together they indicate the presence of truth.” In one of the most entertaining essays, Gary Shteyngert (Russian) links words and ways as he wistfully recalls how the popular culture of America lured him into the language. Ariel Dorfman’s piece about being bilingual (Spanish and English) must have been fun to contemplate but emerges as awkward and off-putting; he sends readers back and forth so frequently between text and massive footnotes that his clever point about two perspectives is lost in the underbrush. The collection closes with a touching and humorous piece by the late Leonard Michaels (Yiddish), who manages to put Elmore Leonard and John Webster in the same sentence—probably a first.
Sometimes fun and often instructive, though occasionally sluggish.Pub Date: July 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42238-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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