A well-researched, highly readable treatment of an important era in racial relations, encapsulated in the meeting of two of...
On Oct. 16, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited a black man, Booker T. Washington, to dinner—and set off a scandal.
It was a typical gesture for the impulsive Roosevelt, who had been made vice president in hopes that his progressive ideals would wither in the largely impotent position. But the assassination of William McKinley made Roosevelt president, and the Republican establishment’s nightmares began. Washington was the embodiment of the rags-to-riches American dream, an ex-slave risen to become the head of the Tuskegee Institute. Davis (Gilded: How Newport Became America's Richest Resort, 2009, etc.) weaves together the two men’s biographies with a portrait of their era—simultaneously a time of immense progress and widespread bigotry. Roosevelt was convinced that the nation’s growth required African-Americans to take a fuller role in national affairs; he also saw the black vote in the South as a key ingredient of Republican power. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he began quietly to consult Washington on political appointments in the South. The dinner seemed a natural outgrowth of that relationship, and it went smoothly enough. However, after an Atlanta reporter wrote about it, the South erupted in fury; a line had been crossed. The dinner became an excuse for lynchings and other racial persecutions and led to a cooling of what had been an important working relationship. Some progressive blacks, including W.E.B. Du Bois, criticized the dinner as setting back racial relations. On the other hand, Scott Joplin used it as the theme of an opera, A Guest of Honor. Davis gives a clear overview of race relations in the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, with plenty of additional detail on the times.
A well-researched, highly readable treatment of an important era in racial relations, encapsulated in the meeting of two of the era’s most significant men.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6981-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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