The image of Dubcek as an apostle of freedom, humanism and liberalization is tarnished by this political biography, probably more so than Shawcross, an East European correspondent for the London Sunday Times, intended. Shawcross maintains that Dubcek rose above the party apparatus to challenge Novotny and precipitate the 1968 thaw, but defends Dubcek's silence during the '50's Slansky purges by claiming he was only a middle-rank bureaucrat who kept clean of the affair and thus remained "innocent." While Dubcek has steadfastly maintained the correctness of his liberalization policies (largely patterned after Khrushchev's thaws), Shawcross indicates that Dubcek earlier thwarted those reforms (especially economic ones) and except on the subject of the invasion has refused to air any criticisms of the U.S.S.R. Shawcross fails to dissect the nation's industrial and agricultural travails, in which Dubcek played a significant part (the inflation-ridden collapse of Ota Sik's "Libermanism" and the dissolution of party authority on the local levels which contributed to the spring upsurge). The Czech philosopher Ivan Svitak, among others, has already pointed out that Dubcek was hardly a single-handed vanguard liberalizer. From 1969 interviews, Shawcross has, however, gathered valuable material on Dubcek's early years. Dubeck's father was an American Socialist Party member who returned to Czechoslovakia in 1921, the year of Alexander's birth, and joined the Communist Party. Dubcek spent his childhood in Russia, the war years in the Czech underground. Three additional years, 1955-58, were devoted to the Higher Party School in Moscow. Many of the details are new and they provide considerable insight into Dubcek's behavior and the bureaucratization of Communist militants in general. These are the features which will draw readers and researchers, not the book's standard Prague Spring narrative, or Shawcross's conclusion that Dubcek "continues to be a hope for the socialist future of Czechoslovakia.
Pub Date: April 1, 1971
ISBN: 0671208411
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971
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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