Penn has emerged as an important presence on the Native American literary front, and this collection does a generally good...
A mixed bag of essays by the Nez Perce writer on Native American literature, academic life, and other intellectual topics.
Penn (English/Michigan State Univ.; All My Sins Are Relatives, 1995, etc.) does honor to the trickster characters Rabbit, Frog, and Coyote with these broadsides, which range from highly personal memoirs to formal, sometimes stilted literary analyses, which make use of sometimes simultaneous, sometimes conflicting voices; ego, superego, and alter ego all have a chance to speak, and they can make quite a din. At their best, the essays punch current notions of political correctness and academic protocol square in the chops, as Penn counts coup on stuffy deans, rad-lib separatists, guilty white liberals, conservative columnists (especially the hapless George Will), and semiliterate undergrads. Penn wreaks havoc with a smile or a sneer, as when he twits the dominant culture for ennobling all Indians, forgetting that there are degrees of quality and sophistication to differentiate the work of, say, James Welch from, say, Sherman Alexie, and when he repudiates postmodern approaches to literature (“in order to have the ‘post-modern,’ one needs a foreshortened sense of time and importance. . . . [T]he price for seeing this way, for aspiring to and even achieving this narrowed depth, is boredom”). At their worst, the essays fall into the expected Indians/good honkies/bad cant (“what do you call a white Christian who pretends to accede to the Ten Commandments and yet lusts after power and closeted fellatio with adolescent girls or who kills directly or indirectly every day”), a scattershot approach that lowers the average. Still, it’s an entertainment to watch Penn as he escapes being pinned down, taking up apparently contradictory positions—and even putting in a mild good word for George Armstrong Custer—just for the fun of it all, making friends and foes alike sweat a little.
Penn has emerged as an important presence on the Native American literary front, and this collection does a generally good job of showing why that should be so.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-3731-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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