A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.
Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s “Back to Africa” movement.
BBC radio producer Grant, himself the son of Caribbean immigrants, delivers a spellbinding portrait of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a printer who mobilized millions through his creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey’s program of racial pride and economic uplift proposed an exodus of black people from the United States, the Caribbean and Central America to a colony in Liberia. Operating mainly from Harlem, he saw his dream of a thriving African homeland for blacks collapse in 1923 after he was convicted of mail fraud, an offense for which he later served a two-year prison sentence. Disgraced, dispirited and largely forgotten by the adoring throngs who once invested in his Black Star shipping line and other self-help business enterprises, the colorful self-styled “President-King” of Africa endured the agony of reading premature (and often vicious) obituaries published long before his death in London at age 52. The author notes that he was drawn to the myth and mystery of Garvey after accompanying his mother on a trip to her native Jamaica. Grant’s learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page, but that doesn’t prevent him from delivering a clear-eyed portrait of a man whose genuine commitment to bettering the lives of blacks was compromised by an outsized ego, a penchant for pageantry and unbridled disdain for mainstream crusaders such as NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Instead, Grant reveals, Garvey publicly and proudly claimed an ally in the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard, who naturally cheered his “Back to Africa” scheme.
A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-536794-2
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
