After discovering W.C. Pennington’s 1849 autobiography, minister and prolific author Webber (editor: An American Prayer...
A richly detailed, wide-ranging biography of a modestly neglected black religious leader who was born a slave.
After discovering W.C. Pennington’s 1849 autobiography, minister and prolific author Webber (editor: An American Prayer Book, 2008, etc.) delved into the archives to learn about this pre–Civil War preacher, educator and abolitionist. Pennington fled north at the age of 19. Illiterate and so ignorant he had never heard of the Underground Railroad, he encountered it after reaching the North. Sympathetic members provided shelter and introduced him to both education and Christianity, which he embraced enthusiastically. Within five years, he was teaching, preaching and participating in the earliest national black-activist organizations. Despite his energy, Pennington lacked the quirks and charisma of contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Fortunately, he lived in interesting times, so readers will encounter the familiar, turbulent, but ultimately successful fight for abolition along with the discouraging, far less successful struggle for black civil rights in the North. By 1860, only six northern states permitted blacks to vote; none could serve on juries. Pennington was regularly refused service in restaurants, forced to ride baggage cars on trains, refused admittance or thrown off trams and directed to the “colored section” when attending white churches—even those whose ministers supported abolition. His protests mostly involved speeches, sermons and essays, which readers may prefer to skim; efforts at legal or political action failed as often as they succeeded.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60598-175-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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