A moving, significant narrative that affords both an elegantly produced glimpse of 19th-century prison life and a new...
An obscure, newly unearthed 19th-century memoir details the prison life of an African-American inmate.
Discovered at an estate sale by a rare book dealer and authenticated by a Yale curating team, Reed’s handwritten, hand-sewn manuscript dated 1858 is now duly recognized with publication in its entirety. A lengthy discussion provided by the book’s editor, Caleb Smith, supplies vital details on the lengths taken to authenticate the document’s history and its genesis as the first-known penitentiary narrative by an African-American writer. Smith pieces together Reed’s life through prison records and varied archival sources to establish a complementary preface to the author’s narrative self-portrait. Written for public consumption, Reed’s lyrical, dramatic prose describes his incremental descent into the New York penal system and a life in legal captivity, by way of a rebellious youth tarnished by the death of his father and a cursory upbringing by a struggling, widowed mother who sent him to work on a farm at a young age. This is the first of three stories of imprisonment Reed depicts. Defiant and uncooperative, he writes of being severely beaten by the farmer, who then met his demise during a revenge plot, which landed the author in the New York House of Refuge reformatory, his second confinement, at 12. Reed toiled and received an education but remained defiant, as evidenced by a botched escape attempt with other inmates. Returning to the clutches of sadistic constables, the author describes their corporal punishments in feverish detail. A repetitive pattern of larcenies and thefts earned him subsequent sentences served at the Auburn state penitentiary during the unreformed antebellum years; Reed endured frequent episodes of dehumanizing punishment. “Rendered with a haunting eloquence,” much of the memoir’s allure is derived from Reed’s poetic, lyrical, passionate voice.
A moving, significant narrative that affords both an elegantly produced glimpse of 19th-century prison life and a new chapter in African-American history through a convict’s eyes.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9709-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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