A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power...
The aspirational story of a young African-American woman’s rise from poverty.
“I considered myself fortunate, but in no way exceptional.” So, toward the end of her memoir, writes Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest executive director Mason of finding herself safely in academia and away from the fraught streets of the inner city. Getting there, she remarks, was a “herculean” matter of working past a host of obstacles—including, she suggests, the whole welfare establishment—that have been set up as if to make sure that children like her do not leave the ghetto for better lives. She levels the charge with such reasonableness that it seems unobjectionable, but of course, her memoir reveals her to be exceptional indeed. Even so, being exceptional, it seems, is not enough: in our Horatio Alger–like conception of wealth and poverty, we imagine that hard work, ambition, and perseverance will see us through and that poor people are that way by choice. Mason puts the lie to such notions, though she also provides ammunition for those who condemn generational welfare with her portrait of her mother, adept at working the system while making money on the side in the drug trade. (At the same time, her mother emerges as a good citizen of a kind, taking care of those even less fortunate.) A key for escape from poverty, by Mason’s account, is education. More than that, there is the kind of social encouragement that her white peers seem to enjoy, with their “different way of being in the world, entitled and less fearful.” Though without that cloying sense of entitlement, Mason’s memoir also proves the power of assertive networking, for once she figured out that others were in positions to help her, she wasn’t shy of asking.
A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power of hope and the institutional changes needed to make hope possible.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06992-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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