Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about...
Thirteen heart-gladdening tales of love on the run in the time of slavery, assembled by award-winning journalist De Ramus.
Not that they all ended happily; many of the lovers will die in these pages. But this impressive debut collection awes us with its stories of slave-era couples, many black, some interracial, who defied mobs and hounds and bounty hunters and taboos to maintain their relationships. De Ramus scoured Civil War, historical society, and court records, unpublished memoirs, and the remembrances of runaway slave couples to gather these stories of abiding affection, and it is not hard to understand why they have endured. These men and women possess a sinewy, breathtaking faith in the success of such acts as hiding out in a sailor’s chest for a few days—easy to say, but rather difficult to thoroughly imagine, especially when you consider that the people in the trunks were upside-down much of the time—or sprinkling cayenne pepper on shoes to distract the trackers’ dogs, or posing in the capes and top hats of southern gents (if your skin color allowed), or riding as a fugitive on the night transport of the Underground Railroad. De Ramus, once a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has a bold voice, flowing with admiration and dramatic in its scene setting, that serves the stories well. The author supplements these energetic narratives with historical background on the Promised Land of Canada, which had its own prejudices against blacks, and the Underground Railroad, which also had its downside: “ . . . only a small band of citizens actually aided slaves, and not all of them welcomed blacks into their homes or even churches except in segregated ‘negro seats.’ ” Once escaped, De Ramus notes, these former slaves didn’t simply hide out, but often started schools and whole communities to aid freed blacks.
Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about being created equal and pursuing happiness. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8263-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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